


Spring Cleaning

by strix_alba



Series: Works No Longer In Progress [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Hannibal (TV), Historical RPF, Sherlock (TV), Supernatural, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Crossover, Multi, Murder Family, POV First Person, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 10:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1507157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of WIPs that I will likely never complete. (1) the Pond family taking a tour of space with Atahualpa; (2) Amy Pond as the Doctor and Eleven as John Smith; (3) WTNV/Sherlock crossover (4) Hannibal, Will, and Abigail being dysfunctional and pathetic together; (5) Supernatural Rule 63 'verse meets canon</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. L'appel du vide (Doctor Who)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doctor!Amy and Companion!Eleven AU, which was planned to be massively long and cover the entire history of Doctor Who. These are some of the "episodes" that got half-written before I got caught up in the details of Time Lord culture.

Prologue

There is a house at the end of the street where John Smith lives. It's huge and peeling; the lawn is overgrown, and the shed collapsed when John was twelve years old. He used to go exploring there, until he came home with ticks on his trousers, and his grandmother forbid him from going there again. He can still explore the house, but the wilderness growing around it, that he used as his jungles and sweeping extraterrestrial landscapes, are forbidden to him.

No one else will go near the house. There aren't any good ghost stories surrounding it, not from what John hears his classmates telling each other. There aren't even any interesting stories about its former owners. No one whispers in hushed tones about the rich father who divorced his wife and threw her and the children out, or the drug ring that operated out of the third floor, or perhaps the brutal murder by werewolves of the entire family. It's just a dilapidated house whose owners are lost in the mists of time.

The second floor of the house has six rooms. One of them is disused; one is a sitting room; one is a bathroom; and three are bedrooms. They could have been used by a family, decorated as they are for one set of adults, and two girls about John's age when he first goes exploring. None of the doors are locked, and on a particularly daring afternoon, led by battery-operated candlelight, John works up the nerve to open their doors. His heart is pounding as he walks into a soft blue room with darker rectangles against the walls where furniture once stood.

There is a crack in the wall.

On a rational level, John understands that it is three o'clock in the afternoon, that sunlight is pouring in through the white curtains, and that it it just a long, thin sliver in the drywall. It's an old house, after all.

On an emotional level, John has never been so uneasy in his life. He isn't frightened, the kind of fear that paralyzes and leaves him prone to acquiring black eyes. Uneasiness means that he feels a powerful urge to run all the way back to his grandmother's cottage, coupled with an equally powerful urge to poke at this crack until it gives up its secrets. But he's only twelve, and the crack looms large in front of him, so the urge to run wins out in the end. He goes home, kicks off his shoes and the jumper his grandmother knit him, and shuts himself in his room. He yells at his grandmother when she tells him it's time for dinner, then comes out and gives her a hug. She smacks the back of his head and gives him a book about a little man who goes treasure-hunting with a group of dwarves.

~~*~~*~~

**The Eleventh Hour**

There are starlings outside the window of the bookshop. A flock of them were there when John Smith opened the ship this morning, and a trio of them still remain outside the open window, chattering for all they are worth. John enjoys it at first, as it makes a nice change from the dead silence of the shop on a Friday morning. It's not that Leadworth is a dull town, (not in terms of people still needing to move about, anyway) but though John flings all of the doors and windows open, ambient noise seems to stop at the threshold.  
Except for the starlings. Their chirping winds through the shelves of books, around the stacks around and on the counter, and directly into John's ears. At one o'clock, he throws aside the extremely battered copy of _Spock's World_ he had been reading, storms over to the window, and leans out of it. 'Will you pipe down?' he shouts at the three birds in the skinny maple tree.

The starlings flap out of the tree, flutter around, and settle back down in slightly higher branches. The racket resumes.

John heaves a sigh and slams the window shut with more force than is absolutely necessary. There goes his fresh air. He turns around to take up his book again, but has hardly gotten settled when the door opens, and a tall woman in red, hair pulled back into a long gray braid, enters the store. She favors him with a demure smile before vanishing behind the religious shelves.

'Can I help you?' calls John. The woman doesn't respond. He puts down his book, more carefully this time, and skips over to the last place he saw his customer. Upon ducking into that set of stacks, he discovers his prey, browsing the selection of books with titles like '2012' and 'What The Mayans Tried To Tell Us'. Huh - he wouldn't have pegged her as the type.

'I said, can I help you? That's what I do, I'm here to help.' He flashes her a smile.

'Yeah, could you get me a cookbook?' she says, with supreme disinterest. 'One of the vegan ones. My sister's just gone and seen one of those documentaries about farms, and now she won't touch meat nor eggs.'

'You could just say, 'No thanks, I don't need any help.' I don't get offended,' says John. 'I'll be up at the front desk if you do need anything.'

The woman in red gives him a smile that isn't really a smile at all. 'Thank you.'

From time to time, John can hear her muttering to herself, always in that section of the bookstore. When he's finished an entire chapter of his book without any further sign of her, he simply resigns himself to her being one of those people who treats the bookstore like a reference library: coming in, reading for a bit under the pretense of 'browsing', and then leaving when they've finished. He helps a student buy a copy of _The Picture of Dorian Grey_ , returns to reading, and is then somewhat surprised when the woman approaches the counter with one cookbook and one fat blue book with a title so elaborate that he can't make it out. John is immediately intrigued.

'What's this one, I've never seen it before.' He flips open the blue book. ' _The Book of Night With Moon._ Cool.'

'Just ring it up, please,' she says.

'And the cookbook?' he asks.

'For my sister,' she repeats.

John tilts his head, but doesn't ask any questions. If she feels bad enough about sending him away to buy another book, he's not about to turn her away. There are some excellent recipes in that book.

The lights flicker as she leaves.

 

An hour and three near-power-outages later, the door to the bookshop opens again, and a redheaded blur of a woman rushes in. John can't help but stare a bit, because she is very pretty. She weaves through the shelves as quickly as possible towards John, who is at the time standing on a ladder, trying to replace some of the books from the counter.

'Hi!' She pauses to gasp for breath. 'Do you work here?'

'Of course I work here,' says John. He should be insulted. He practically breathes bookkeep old before his time. 'How can I help you today?'

'I'm looking for a book,' she says.  
'Well, yes, that'd be why most people come here. Unless they're just looking for a place to hide from someone; there's an awful lot of that, too.' He gets down from the ladder, and places the books on one of the rungs so that they won't get lost and molder for all eternity.

The woman scans the shelves. 'Huh. Hiding, you say? Sounds perfect. Do you happen to have any old books? Like, really old? About this size ...' She holds up her hands about six inches apart. 'I can't remember the title, exactly, but it's very important that I find it.'

'The Book of Night With Moon?' asks John, on a whim.

Her eyes widen. She grabs him by the shoulders. 'How did you know that?'

He grins. It always makes him feel kind of magical when he can guess what someone is in here for, and it's even more rewarding when he can guess before they know themselves. 'Lucky guess.'

'Do you have it?'

John backs up a step, to remove himself from her ever-tightening grip. 'Er. Well, I don't know. I don't think so, but I apparently had a copy of it this morning, so it's possible there are more floating around that I don't know about. Let's go poke around and find out, shall we?' He edges around her in the narrow stacks, and bounces away from World History and back towards New Age Spirituality. He assumes that that's where the other woman got the book. 'I do have to ask,' he calls over his shoulder, once he is sure that she will follow him, 'What brings you here? I know practically everyone in this town, and you're the second out-of-town customer I've had today. It's very disconcerting. I love it.'

'What do you mean, you had a copy this morning? Don't you still have it?' she asks.

He reaches the generally apocalyptic section and spins on the spot to face her. 'Someone else came in and bought it.'

The effect it has on her is peculiar: her already pale face turns just a shade paler. 'Who?' she demands.

John bends down and begins scanning the shelves. He knows every book on here, could rank them all by increasing absurdity if anyone asked him to do so; and while it's possible that he's overlooked one three-inch spine here before, whilst organizing, it's less likely that he's overlooked two of the same. 'Dunno. That was the other stranger I met today.' No, no, not here. Maybe in the next section over; maybe it's an obscure religious book, or maybe Simon miscatalogued it as something else.

'What did he look like?' she asks.

'She. Older woman. Probably Pakistani, and her sister's recently gone vegan. Do you know if I'm looking in the right section?' John asks her.

The woman leans against the bookshelves. 'So, not him again. Unless he's decided to switch things up a bit, but nah. And why?' She twirls her hair around her hand. 'She was from out of town, you said?'

John straightens and peers at her. 'I don't help other people pry, it's not polite.'

She rolls her eyes. 'I'm not prying, I'm just asking. It's not exactly a common book, and I want to know what someone else is doing with it.'

'Reading, I'd imagine,' he can't keep himself from saying. The lights flicker, and he flicks his fingers at them like it will keep the birds from sitting on the power lines and mucking with the flow of electricity. 'Stop that,' he murmurs at them.

'Has that been happening often?' she asks.

He scowls. 'You are a busybody, aren't you.'

The redheaded woman glares at him. 'It's my business to body, and it's not a book you read.'

'Then what is it, and who are you?'

' _It_ tells you how to erase events from history, and _I_ am the Doctor.' She folds her arms.

John thinks, from the way that she says it, that he ought to be impressed. He isn't. She is determined, but she is also significantly shorter than him, but regardless, she has just soared into his good graces with the mention of the book's unusual contents. 'Really? Like that dummy copy of _The Red Book of Costamaret_ going round the internet a few years ago?' he asks.

'What? No! Don't be stupid, I mean an actual book with actual diagrams and schematics to erase actual history. And some woman's just up and bought it! You said she was here this morning?'

Her clothing is a bit odd, but not of the mentally-disturbed variety, and she doesn't talk like an insane person. Perhaps just misguided, John thinks, and with the practice of years, does not listen to the bubble of excitement in the back of his mind that tells him this is the moment, this is when he gets his own adventure. 'About an hour ago,' he says. Something bright sparks at the corner of his eye; he blinks, and it's gone before he can turn his head to get a proper look at it.

The Doctor turns at the same time. 'That's not been going on for long, has it,' she says. 'Since about an hour ago too, right?'

John lists over to one side to peer around the bookcase after the flash of light; all he sees is a sliver of street through the window, so it was probably just a car. Nothing exceptional. He bounces back. 'Do you mean to imply that there's a correlation between strange women buying books, and power outages? This is Leadworth. I have to drive ten minutes just to get packages delivered from London because the mail carrier refuses to deliver here more than once a month. It's not the most technologically sound area in Britain.' It isn't like him to defend the town, not when he can hardly stand it himself, but the insinuation that _nothing ever happens_ to the extent that a stranger thinks flickering power lines are an acceptable topic of conversation? It rubs him the wrong way. He's the only one allowed to criticize his hometown in this situation.

'All right, all right. Cool your gasket. Please.' She sighs. 'It's been lovely talking to you, Mr., uh ...'

'Smith,' he supplies. 'John Smith.'

The Doctor shakes her head. 'John Smith, that's exciting.'

'Not my decision.'

'Yes, well, it's been lovely talking to you, Mr. Smith. Let me know if you see that woman around, will you?' She pats him on the shoulder, and walks past him. 

'The door is that way,' he feels compelled to point out. 'It's a maze in here, I know.'

 

'Wait!' John says, as she leaves. 'Wait, what do you mean, what are you - oh.'

The Doctor stops on the stoop of the bookstore. He comes up behind her and stares out with her. 'What was that about this being a tiny, normal town?' she asks.

The street around them is filled with floating yellow pinpoints of light. Not fireflies: far too bright for that, and far too lazy. It is, John thinks, like a river of stars flowing down Main Street. The people who are out and about stop to stare, and look off to the east, from whence the river seems to originate. John follows their gaze. His grandmother's home is in that direction; his mind goes to her and if she's noticed, and if he should worry about her, although the lights don't seem to be doing anything at the moment besides drifting in sync. With the clouds covering the sky, the effect is hypnotic.

'Oh no,' the Doctor whispers under her breath. 'Oh, you bastard.'

'This is brilliant,' says John. With the initial shock of the sight past, he cannot contain the overwhelming delight that wells up in him at something so out of the ordinary. _I knew it! I knew it was all real - well, not all of it, but I knew magic was real -_

'Are you daft?' The Doctor rounds on him. ''Brilliant'?'

He falters under her gaze, but recovers himself. 'But it's, it's magic! It's new, it's different! A woman looking for the _Necronomicon_ and rivers of light in the streets.' He spins around in a circle, grinning up at the sky.

The Doctor doesn't seem to share his enthusiasm: she looks at him as though she isn't sure whether to laugh or to lecture. 'I suppose they're pretty,' she says, through gritted teeth.

'Pretty? That's all you have to say, that they're pretty? Have you ever seen anything like this before?' He will not shake her; she is a customer, after all, and it's bad form to assault those.

'Actually, yes. They're called G'zokut, which more or less translates to 'brain locusts'.'

For the first time since secondary school, John has no ready response.

'What do you say? Want to go find out where they're coming from?' asks the Doctor. 'That's what I'm doing.'

John Smith thinks about it for exactly one-fourth of a second. 'Like a shot.'

'Good. I could use a bit of local know-how, it's a hell of a time to get lost,' she says.

The flow of lights seems to get thicker and more quick-moving as the Doctor leads John at a breakneck pace down the street. 'Brain locusts,' he shouts to the Doctor. 'Really.'

'Semisentient descendants of gravitationally collapsed blue straggler stars from Messier 80 that evolved the ability to cross pleated dimensions to feed off of electrical impulses given out by other species. Yes, really.'

John looks up at the little pinpricks of light. They've started to cluster around the power lines, he notices, though they don't seem to be doing anything besides that. His head spins. 'I understood maybe two of those words. Travelling black holes that look like white holes?'

The Doctor stops at a fork in the road, before deciding that the source of the lights was probably on the left side of the right road, and not the right side of the left road. 'Not really. Keep up, shop boy.'

'I am keeping up. This is my road,' he adds, then _please, Gran, don't have been eaten._ He should have known, the knowledge that there is magic in the world comes with a price, and that price would be his grandmother, his final ties to this life being cut loose. He isn't sure how he feels about that.

The Doctor says nothing to that, but picks up her pace further. Her hair whips out behind her, highlighted by the light of the brain locusts. They pass by his house, and John can see clearly that the locusts are coming from further down the street. Locusts swarm around the roof of the house; the lights in the dining room flicker and go out.

He splits off from the Doctor and bounds up the steps of his house without a moment's hesitation. He does not want an origin story, dammit. He throws open the door. 'Granny Wendy!'

The inside of the house is dark. He runs into the dining room, lighter with its oversized bay window. Granny Wendy is sitting in the window, swamped by a mostly finished crochet blanket. 'Yes, dear?' she says.

John breathes a sigh of relief. 'Oh thank you. Thank you for not being my call to adventure, thank you. Stay inside, and don't wander off, do you hear?' He presses a kiss to the top of her head and dashes out.

The Doctor is waiting for him by the mailbox. She doesn't ask any questions, or have any comments, just continues their mad dash where they left off. The flow of locusts thins out the closer they get to its source, and John worries that they won't be able to trace it back at all; until they round the bend, and they are confronted by a house long overgrown with weeds, its roof on the point of collapse. John flashes back to the last day he was in that house. With a sinking knot in his stomach, John suddenly knows, with greater certainty than rational deduction could afford him, where they are headed.

'First room on your right off the second-floor stairs,' he tells the Doctor. 'There's a crack, a crack in the wall.'

The Doctor charges ahead, and pushes the weeds aside with either hand. John trails after her with the hair on the back of his neck rising. He tells himself that this was half a lifetime ago, and he's grown up since then, but it's even approaching the same time of day. 

A bramble whacks him in the face. He rubs his stinging cheek and follows the Doctor more closely.

 

By the time they have forged their way to the front door, the Doctor's legs are covered in little scratches from the weeds, and John's heart is pounding like he's just run a marathon. The Doctor reaches into her vest and pulls out something like a metal pen with a light at one end. She points it at the door handle. The end lights up green and makes a high-pitched whirring noise. John jumps, and the door clicks open. The Doctor pockets the device and pushes the door inward.

'What was that?' John asks, feeling his eyebrows climb on his forehead and unable to suppress them.

'It's a sonic.' The Doctor looks around. 'Room on the right, you said?'

'Second floor.' The interior of the house is exactly as John remembers it, though mustier: a tiled entrance, leading to a parlor with several recent photographs on the mantel, and a staircase on the left. The Doctor is already halfway up the stairs by the time he shakes himself and takes them two at a time after her. He leaves the door open to let in the light.  
The blue room is full of light. It sears John's eyes where it escapes around the edges of the door, which doesn't quite fit into its hinges. He could swear it makes a sound, just outside the edges of his awareness.

The Doctor squints. 'Brace yourself,' she says, at the same time as she opens the door and drags John inside.

'Mother Earth,' he sputters. 'Generally you give the warning before burning people's retinas to a crisp.'

'Open your eyes, dingbat,' is the Doctor's reply.

He does, gingerly at first, and then, when he realizes that the light isn't going to blind him, opens them further. The light has either gathered itself in force around the door, at the expense of all else, or else it has dimmed now that there are people in the room (unlikely, but so is the existence of white black holes, so John is prepared to reserve judgment). Either way, it emanates from the crack in the wall, and includes several more of the brilliant yellow locusts as they drift out through the closed window. Looking at the crack makes John feel sick to his stomach, unable to get enough air into his lungs.

The Doctor makes a hissing noise through her teeth and creeps closer. She clicks a couple of dials on her sonic device and waves it at the crack. Her mouth twists into a frown. 'I don't like this,' she says. 'It's not just a crack in the wall; it's a crack in time and space. Do you know how not good that is?'

'How do you mean?' John asks carefully. 'Like a wormhole?'

She shoots him an odd look. 'No, I mean a crack, like someone ripped a hole in your shirt and instead of seeing your own arm when you look through the hole, you see a fish. Except with ...' She trails off. 'Brain locusts.'

'But.' There's some part of this that John doesn't understand. (Actually, there are a lot of parts that he doesn't understand, that he's only not questioning by assuming that his life is currently operating like a sci-fi novel.) 'That crack has been there for ages. What's changed, why's it gone kablooey now?'

'Good question.' The Doctor taps the sonic device against her lower lip. 'I've got a theory. But right now, we're going to close this up. You might want to stand back.' She makes several adjustments to the dials, then waves John back. He edges behind her, attempting to use her as a shield since she obviously knows more about what to do than he does. It quickly becomes apparent that this isn't going to work, given the height and size difference.

The Doctor points the screwdriver at the crack, and shouts a battle cry that sounds suspiciously like, 'Oh god oh god oh god'. The light in the room intensifies, and John fights the urge to dive out the window as the whirring noise builds and the crack widens. _What are you doing, what are you doing, you're going to kill everyone_ he shrieks, or would if the words would leave his mouth. As they don't, he dives behind the bed frame instead. The crack takes up a good deal of the wall at this point, and if John squints, he can distinguish small yellow pinpoints zipping around in the midst of the greater, overwhelming whiteness of it all. The Doctor stops shouting and wrenches her arms down to her sides as though it takes a great effort. The crack flares wider for a second, before snapping shut with a stentorian crash that John would swear shakes the house. It could be him, shaking, but he prefers to think better of himself.

A final locust floats out the window after its predecessors. The Doctor rubs her forehead. 'You can stand up now,' she says. 'You're probably not going to die for another twenty minutes or so.'

John pops to his feet with what's left of his dignity. 'I don't like the sound of that. What do you mean?'

'I mean, they're not called 'brain locusts' because they go around improving your neurocircuitry. They eat electrical impulses. First the junk food - power lines, coffee makers, televisions - which, town this size? Number of locusts that have come through? About twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five. Then they move on to the fun stuff. People! Great big entrees with a hundred billion synapses to drain. And then maybe they'll have the next town over for breakfast as dessert, unless we can stop them.' The Doctor runs her hand over the wall to make sure that the crack has closed properly. 'Come on.' She jerks her head towards the door and exits dramatically.

John ducks his head and runs after her. 'What? Wait! Hold on a second, what's your theory? How do you know so much about what's going on? How did you do that?' He clatters down the stairs after the Doctor. 'I've got questions!'

'And I've got a world to save!' she calls back over her shoulder. 'Again.'

'Okay.' He runs a hand through his hair and straightens his bow tie. He can handle not having his curiosity sated for twenty minutes. He catches up to the Doctor halfway across the yard, where she is delayed doing battle with an overgrown blueberry bush. 'Where are we going?'

'Get off me, you stupid plant - I don't know. I'm trying to remember how we got rid of the locusts last time, and it's not coming to me, just - just give me a moment.' She thrashes free of the bush and waves her screwdriver at it, which produces no effect. Above them, locusts swarm thick around the power lines, and the air hums with draining energy.

'Last time?' John asks, averting his eyes from the lights above them.

'Yeah, it was five hundred years ago,' she snaps. 'Been a while.'

'Five hundred years.' He's beginning to feel like a very small child, tagging along after an adult. It's not a pleasant feeling, and he does his best to pretend it's not there. 'Of course. Do you have any idea? Maybe recall the, er, the circumstances under which you first ...'

The Doctor snaps her fingers and points at him. 'I need a kitchen,' she says.

'I've got one,' says John. 'My grandmother's house.'

'Perfect,' says the Doctor. 'We're going to bake a cake. Grandmothers always have supplies of that sort handy, don't they? Part of being a grandmother.'

'What is this - is that a thing, do you need to spontaneously bake under stress?' John asks, without thinking.

The Doctor gives him a look of incredulity, that says, _I would like very much to slap you across the face, and am only restraining myself because the town is seventeen minutes away from going messily brain-dead._ 'Yes, of course,' she says. 'Do I look like the baking type?' John doesn't answer, as he feels that anything he says is likely to get him hit and possibly left behind. Whatever is going on, he doesn't want to be left out of the loop. 'No, I need to bake because that's what we did last time. We baked a cake, though not one you're likely to want to eat, unless you've evolved the ability to digest broken glass since I was here last. Where's your house again?'

'This way. I'll go ahead to let Gran know we're coming, so she doesn't, ah, get out her crowbar.' John sets off at a sprint, eyes on the lights and locusts above his head at all times.

 

'Hand me that spoon,' she says. 'Do you have any cables in the house?'

'Cables?'

'Extension cords, something with wires. Think of bombs.'

'Thinking,' says John, wandering out of the kitchen to find wires. 'Not liking it.' Telly, radio, lamps ... he's never liked the ugly striped lamp in the corner, anyway. He pulls the plug out of the wall and bring the entire affair back to the kitchen. 'Will this do?'

The Doctor dumps half the box of baking powder into the enormous bowl that John has somehow overlooked his entire life. She takes the lamp and rips the cord out of the base. 'Perfect. Marbles, have you got marbles, they do something. Not sure what. It'll come to me.'

John flies to the end of the stairs and leans over the railing. 'Gran, where are your marbles?'

'Lost them years ago, dear,' comes the sepulchral cackle from above.

'Well, you're no help,' he mutters. At the back of his mind, he recalls a distant memory of spring cleanings past, and satchels hastily shoved in the coffee table drawer. It is but the work of a moment to find them, dusty and chipped but still more or less of marble-like qualities. John upends the lot of them into the dough, which is quickly taking on the properties of a thick, metallic stew. 'This is supposed to be a cake?' he asks the Doctor.

'Close enough.'

'And what do we do when the electricity runs out?' There's no way to run a stove without it, even his grandmother got rid of her wood-burning stove when he nearly cooked himself as a kid, and anyway the bowl is so big it took both of them to lift it out from under the sink and onto the counter, there's no way it would bake in twenty minutes - thirteen minutes, at this point. Right on cue, the already blinking lights succumb to the locusts, and John and the Doctor are plunged into relative darkness.

'We keep on. I can power up the stove for long enough to bake it, and after that, all we need to do is plug it into an outlet. Make yourself useful, strip the wires on this.' The Doctor passes John a pair of scissors and the cord.

'Yes, okay. Plug the cake into the electrical system, turn the cake on, and this will reverse the polarity of the electrical current,' John says, more as a question than a statement.  
'Yep. Culinary science, dead useful, and no one ever sees it coming. The locusts are all feeding by now, or most of them, anyway. If a few of them escape, it's no big deal - they only breed every thousand years or so, and I'm pretty sure they've been coming through that crack for years.'

John starts to say that that's not possible - he would have noticed if there were mind-sucking black holes floating around Leadworth - and then he thinks about the town's horrible track record with electricity, and the fact that he'd grown up accepting that sometimes, the telly just wasn't going to work for a couple of seconds at a time, or that light bulbs always met an early demise no matter how careful he was with them. Some parts of his life begin to make sense.

The minor, inconsequential ones, anyway. John just keeps plugging along until the bigger things fall into place. 'So why did they all suddenly swarm through now?'

The Doctor stirs in half a dozen eggs, shells and all. 'Because I'm here, and whoever bought that book of yours doesn't want me to have it. If I leave to follow them, I make it a hell of a lot harder to contain the locusts. They spread to other parts of England, people die.'

John starts to get out the beaters, remembers that the power is dead, and finds a whisk instead to try and beat in the eggs and marbles. 'Hang on, so this is all about a book?'  
'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will end the universe,' sings the Doctor.

 

They finish the cake with seven minutes to spare. The Doctor assures John that this is a wide margin compared to the schedule under which she usually operates.

'We've got no electricity,' he points out. 'And this looks nothing like a cake right now.'

'I know, I know. Thinking,' she says. 'Any ideas would be appreciated right about now.'

'You're the one who knows what's going on!' John protests.

'Yes, and I'm clever, not omnipotent. Put your thinking cap on.'

John doesn't think that putting on his actual thinking cap will help, but the act of expending the energy that it takes to get from the kitchen to his bedroom to retrieve it, and back again, gives him something to do. It also gives the Doctor a good laugh when she sees him.

'A fez? Really?'

'Down the street!' John takes one side of the bowl and mimes heaving it; the Doctor grabs the other end, and together, they lift it off the counter. 'It'll take them seven minutes more to finish devouring the town's electricity, there's got to be somewhere they've missed, right? Up until they haven't.'

'I just need an oven with electricity for thirty seconds, it doesn't need to be that long,' she says. John tries to figure out how that works. 'I've got my ways,' says the Doctor as the maneuver their way out of the door. 'Can you get the door? We need to find a house as far from here as you can drive in five minutes.'

'You really don't want me to drive anywhere in a hurry. I'm worse than my gran when she's lost her glasses,' John says, feeling more useless by the second. He shifts his grip on the bowl to open the back door of the car. For a second that stops his heart, the bowl slips, and sloshes a bit of batter onto the pavement, before the Doctor rights it.

'And the last car I touched was a Model T, back when I was barely four hundred years old. Get in, there, and we can slide it in after - too fast! Steady! There. Now get out and drive like your life depends on it. I'll watch this thing.' She slides into the back seat and wraps herself around their world-saving cargo. John bites the inside of his lip, and does not think about the kinds of remarks that his driving instructor would make if he knew that his life depended on John's driving fast enough and without hitting any frantic pedestrians in a quest to reach the far end of town.

'What happens if we don't make it? Say we don't find a house with electricity, or we do, and it goes out before we can plug it in?' John puts the car into gear and eases out of the driveway. Should have covered the cake; too late now. With the open road ahead of him, he applies pressure to the gas pedal, all whilst the commonsense part of his head cries _No no no you are going to kill someone, Smith! Abort! Abort!_

'We contain the collateral damage,' the Doctor says from the back seat. 'We find the nearest power line outside of town, and zap that before the locusts do.'

'And the people?' John jumps an inch out of his seat as he swerves to avoid a fork in the road. Main Street, go for one of the big houses. The old peoples' home? Yes! It's far, it's big, there's a better chance that somewhere in that house will be a working outlet. And definitely an oven.

'We evacuate. Just start grabbing people and run. They know you, they'll listen for long enough. Three minutes.'

John urges the little beat-up car to go faster, rather than reply; the town isn't particularly crowded, but he still has to jump to the right side of the road at multiple points to overtake other cars. The clock is ticking, metaphorically speaking, and the locusts surrounding houses and power lines shine alarmingly at the corners of his eyes. The effect is such that he nearly misses the retirement home, and it is an effort to slow down, rather than slam directly on the brakes and send the batter spilling.

'Out, out, out!' he shouts, bursting from the car elbows first in his haste. Several dozen locusts descend on the boot of the car; John swats at them fruitlessly. They send strange shocks through his skin when he touches them.

The Doctor pushes the enormous bowl out at him. They half-stagger, half-run with it to the home. John kicks at the handle until his foot manages to catch on the lever and lift it, pushing it open. 'Excuse us!' he shouts into the entryway. 'Coming through!'

'One and a half minutes!'

'Hi! Kitchen, where's your kitchen?' John asks the startled aide at the door of the parlor. She blinks at him. 

'Now, please,' adds the Doctor.

'Why?' asks the aide. 'John, who's this?'

'Hi, I'm the Doctor. Kitchen inspection! Ah, thanks. John, go straight down this hallway.' She nudges him; he hauls himself in that direction posthaste. 'She looked this way at the word 'inspection',' the Doctor explains.

'Found it!' John cries, waddling backwards. He shoves the doors inward with his shoulders, and they open on an industrial-sized room with its overhead lights flickering, but still on. 'Praise Allah!'

'Get the oven, get the oven, we've got sixty seconds.'

It takes nine of those seconds to open the oven and lever the cake in, another second to shut it, and five to figure out how to turn it on. 'Doesn't matter what setting, I just need _something_ to work with,' says the Doctor. She fiddles with the settings on her screwdriver, squinting at it. 'Ha ha! Got it.' She presses the end of the screwdriver to the oven, and turns it on. John holds his breath and counts the seconds down. _Forty-four. Forty-three. Forty two ..._

From inside the oven comes a sound like a cap gun going off.

The Doctor opens it. The lights blink off for a second, and when they come back on, John can see the domelike top of the pastry in its bowl.

'And they said the only thing you could do was hang cabinets,' the Doctor croons at her screwdriver. 'Lamp cord? Where did you put the lamp cord?'

John experiences a moment of pure, all-encompassing panic, in which his thought process is, more or less, _I left it at home, we are all going to die because I am such a scatterbrain._ He reaches up to his throat, and his hand closes around the makeshift necklace he'd looped the cord into to keep it out of the way. He doesn't even have time to be relieved: he tears it off his neck, plunges the stripped end into the top of the cake, and holds it in place as the Doctor plugs the free end into the wall over the counter.

'Twenty-five seconds,' the Doctor says, eyes on the ceiling lights.

They wait for three seconds. The air is thick.

And every light in the room suddenly turns on, and turns a brilliant lime green.

The Doctor gives out a shriek of delight and claps her hands over her mouth. John rushes to the window. Outside, the locust swarms cease their drifting as though the air around them has turned to stone, and turn the same shade of green as the kitchen. The lights across the street are on; and in the street, people stop and stare in wonder and confusion. John counts seventeen cameras out, photographing the locusts, and he laughs.

'I added food dye,' says the Doctor, close behind him. 'So we'd be able to tell if it worked. And it did!' She sounds giddy. John steps aside to let her see out the window as well. 'That ought to shock 'em. I added a bit of DNA splice. It rewrites the digestive mechanisms and coordinate specifications for their end-matter routines, overriding the conditioning towards electrical impulses and transferring it to alpha radiation. Just this group that got let through. Created a new subspecies and saved the day; not too bad, eh?' The Doctor gives him a friendly punch in the arm and grins. John smiles back.

The door to the kitchen bangs open. The aide storms in. 'You two ain't got nothing to do with the electricity, do you?' she demands. ' 'It's always John Smith,' that's what I told Nana Jeanine.'

The Doctor tilts her head at John before addressing the nurse. 'Nope, that was all me. Sorry. I roped poor Johnny into this all on my own, and - by the way - you're very welcome.' She loops an arm around John's shoulders, never mind that he's a bit too tall for it to be comfortable for either of them, and kicks the end of the wire out of the cake. The lights return to normal. 

The aide purses her lips at them. 'All the same, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave the building. You're something of a hazard to the residents.'

'Not a problem! We were just going.' The smile that the Doctor gives her is so charmingly innocent that if John hadn't just participated in her mad schemes, he wouldn't have believed it possible for her to be anything other than totally benign.

John points at the cake. 'You should probably bin that. _She's not a very good cook,_ ' he adds in a stage whisper.

 

The Doctor attempts a garbled explanation, but breaks off mid-sentence with wide eyes and mouth half-open. John's head fills with visions of returning locusts and reversing DNA splices. He braces himself. The Doctor reaches into her vest pocket and pulls out a house key, glowing red-gold.

'Oho, took your sweet time, did you?' she says.

'Sorry?' says John.

She looks up at him with a grin, fingers curling shut. 'Want to see something cool?'

'Is it going to try to kill me?'

The Doctor rolls her eyes. 'Come on.' Her fingers catch on his shirt sleeve and tug him around the corner. John Smith tells himself not to lose his head. He's gone off the map, and he has no idea where he's going. This could still be the end of the insanity, regardless. Still, it's wonderful.

She tugs him down the street, and turns down the narrow, gravel-paved road off the side of the retirement home. The clouds still covering the afternoon sky, coupled with a few stray locusts floating upwards, cast an eerie, otherworldly glow over the scenery. The Doctor leads him past the house where John's one and only childhood friend still loves, past the field where there used to be sheep but aren't anymore. 'Am I allowed to ask where we're going?' John asks. He's explored every inch of this town in the twenty-five years he has lived here, and he knows for certain that there's nothing down this street besides more houses, and a pile of stones that used to be a house in the seventh century. What a foreigner wants with this road - why she even knows it exists - is a mystery.

The Doctor charges ahead without answering. There is a skip in her step. John searches around for anything out of place; initially, he sees nothing. Then, at the very end of the road, past the last pile of stones - no, right in the middle of them - if he peers closely, he can see a sort of shimmering in the air. A few paces more, and the shimmer becomes a blue haze. By the time the Doctor breaks out into a flat-out run, arms spread wide and a blissful grin on her face, John is blinking and wondering how on earth he managed to miss the blue police box standing in the jumble of stone foundations at the end of the road. The Doctor scrambles over the fallen front wall and pats the police box.

'John Smith! I'd like you to meet my TARDIS,' she says.

John nearly tumbles head over heels with excitement. 'Hello, TARDIS! What's a TARDIS?'

'Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. She's my baby. Wanna see inside?' She waggles her eyebrows.

For a second, practicality overtakes the delight threatening to short out John's brain. 'A time machine?'

'Time _and_ space.'

'You couldn't have mentioned this while we were scrambling for time, racing the clock to find a kitchen?'

The Doctor scowls. 'Have you ever tried running a marathon with a broken leg?' she counters.

John blinks. 'You broke your time machine?'

'She crashed when we came out in your ionosphere, and the stabilizers seemed to have aged a couple millenia, so down we went.' She mimes the action with her hand. 'Whoever thought that would be enough to get rid of me is an idiot, but it did a number on the TARDIS. Satisfied?'

John thinks about this. 'Someone really doesn't want you to buy that book.'

'Interesting, huh? Come on. Step inside, this isn't even the cool part yet.' She turns the key and slips inside the door, waving him in after her.

It is the most glorious moment of John's life thus far. The air that pours out of the TARDIS is warm and golden, issuing forth from an improbably vast interior. The Doctor's footsteps echo as she runs up to a raised platform, on which stands a huge hexagonal console. From its center rises a glass column with another clear structure inside it shaped like a Christmas ornament. John takes a step inside. The ceiling vaults up over his head as though he's stepped inside an enormous coral reef in a gold and green sea. The Doctor, standing against the console, looks more a part of her surroundings in this room than running around in English streets.

The English streets! John pokes his head out and takes a look at the box from the outside: just a four by four blue police box. Very ordinary-looking and nothing at all to suggest that there's an enormous construction inside. Of course, then John has to rush back inside to make sure that it's still there. Then he has to stare all over again. Only when the sides of his face start to ache does he realize that he's been beaming since the Doctor first opened the door.

'What do you think?' she asks.

'It's fantastic! Better than the Enterprise!' John bounces over to one of the pillars and climbs up into the fork.

'Oi, it's nothing like the Enterprise. That was built by humans; no comparison.' 

There it is again, that niggling 'you humans' thing that she keeps bringing up. John swings on the pillar, hanging out into the open air. 'You keep saying 'humans'. I don't like it. What are you, then?' he asks, jumping down and spinning on the spot. His head tips back to take in the bright console room around him.

'Time Lord,' she says. 'Lord of Time.' She lounges against the upper railing to look down at him.

Something about that strikes John as incorrect. He freezes in place until it comes to him. 'Shouldn't it be Time Lady?' he asks. 'No offense ...'

The Doctor - the _alien_ , oh man his life is fantastic - snorts. 'No. I'm the last of my kind, I get to make the rules, and I want to be a Time Lord. Sounds better.' She presses her lips together, daring him to argue.

Considering that she's the one with the time machine, John decides not to push the issue. He switches topics instead. 'The last of your kind? What happened to the rest of them? The other Time Lords and Ladies.'

The Doctor spins back to the console, flipping switches. John just barely catches the scowl on her face before her back is entirely to him. 'Gone, they're - they're gone, does it matter? Can't we just skip to the part where you come with me and we go off and see the universe?'

John's heart skips a beat, but even though half of his mind leaps immediately to plans, ideas, possibilities, the other half insists that he understand what he's getting himself into. So, 'Yes,' he says, 'it does matter. For all I know, you're just a madwoman with a space ship. You could be an escaped criminal, you could be a lunatic warlord looking for new cannon fodder, you could have blown up your own planet just so you could introduce yourself as the 'last lord of time' for all that you've told me about yourself.'

The Doctor crosses her arms and leans back against the console. John can't read the expression on her face; 'pinched' comes to mind, though it's a description that he's only ever read in books. Whatever it is, she lets silence fall between them, and stretches it on for an uncomfortable length of time.

'I didn't blow up the planet,' she says at last. 'I locked it, in time. No one can get in or out.'

John should run for the street, away from this madwoman. He should go back to his store and forget about the Doctor and the tattooed woman with the odd Wiccan books. That would be the sensible thing to do.

John bounds up the steps and sits down against the railing. He looks up at the Doctor. 'Why?'

'I had to,' she says, and looks away.

'Why did you have to?'

'Look, are you coming or not?'

'Will you tell me why you blew up your planet?'

'No.'

'Then ...' No, says the sensible part of him. 'Yes, I think I will,' says John's mouth. 'Time machine, right? I can be back before anyone even thinks about missing me, and no one will no I'm gone.'

A strange look crosses the Doctor's face, one which she banishes with a smile. 'Of course. You could be back already, outside. Who knows?'

'Then what are we waiting for? Push that lever, flip that thingamabob! Just tell me what to do, captain!'

The Doctor laughs. 'Aren't you going to change that bowtie? The bookshop can wait.'

John adjusts his collar reflexively. 'I like it. Bowties are cool.'

'Yeah, if you're from the nineteen forties. Never mind. All of the universe! The whole of time and space. Where do you want to start?'

 

~~*~~*~~

**The End of the World**

The room that the TARDIS made for John to sleep in is somehow close enough to the library and kitchen that he can reach both within a minute, but far enough from the console room that he ends up wandering around for nearly half an hour before he finds it. Try as he might, he can't work out the physics needed for this to be possible; finally, he gives up and reminds himself that this is all, technically, inside a police box, so perhaps he shouldn't think too hard about it. Thirty seconds later, he runs into the Doctor, walking down a hallway while reading an encyclopedia whose pages are inscribed with many complicated-looking circles. Literally runs into her, because the hall is one of the narrower ones, and the Doctor isn't looking where she's going. (Though neither is John, to be fair.)

'Oh! Hello,' says the Doctor, snapping the book shut. 'All rested up and you ready to go? I thought we might go find a planet to explore.'

'Okay.' John rubs his hands together in anticipation. 'I haven't the faintest idea what's out there. You'll have to surprise me. If we can ever find our way back to civilization, that is.'

'Lost?' she asks innocently.

John coughs. 'Not at all. Just ... um ... exploring the interior before we get to the outside. Yeah. I'll be going now.' He wanders off in a random direction, and just when he's stopped being so embarrassed about running off in a huff that he starts to pay attention to where he is again, he steps out into the control room.

'Bollocks,' he says.

'Ha ha, got you! I knew you were lost.' And the Doctor appears once more, popping out of another door that he could swear wasn't there last time he saw that wall. 'I've just thought of something. It's brilliant, you're going to love it. Everyone loves a supernova.' She races to the console and begins flipping levers. John watches from a respectful distance, fearing that if he gets too close, he is likely to fall over from the kinetics of it all and hit something important, possibly spinning them off into a black hole or something equally horrifying. Something like ...

'A supernova? A real, actual supernova?'

'No, dummy, a fake one. Yes! I've been meaning to go to E0102 for ages, but there's never been ... I've never gotten around to it. Good way to start off traveling in space; some people get overwhelmed, or get sick, or start running around willy-nilly in an alien culture and need to be rescued.'

John gathers his courage enough to approach her, keeping one hand on the railing at all times. Just in case. 'You've had people before?' he asks.

The Doctor flips her hair out of her face. 'Yeah, don't think you're that special. I need to have people around; I'd go mad all by myself.'

'Where are they now?' He can't help but look around the room as he asks. The TARDIS is, from what he's seen of it so far, enormous; there could be whole legions of people hiding in its corners, and he'd never know. Maybe they're there right now.

'Hold on!' The Doctor pulls pushes a big yellow button, and the floor leaps underneath them. John throws himself against the railing and clings to it with both hands to avoid falling on anything. 'Wherever I left them last. On Earth, a lot of them. Or their home planet. Most are alive and intact, if that's what you're asking, and the ones that aren't, they are not my fault.'

John heaves himself upright as the motion of the TARDIS begins to stabilize. 'That's not very reassuring, you know.'

The Doctor grins at him across the controls, a bright feral expression that may or may not be forced for dramatic effect, but is effective at scaring the pants off of him either way. 'Soldiers. Schoolteachers. Alien hunters. Tin dog associate of an alien hunter. I have had only one death in eight hundred years, John Smith, now should I turn this thing around or do you want to go see a star explode?'

The floor tilts to the side, and John finds his feet sliding out from underneath him. He scrabbles to hang onto his position. _I thought this was supposed to be a rescue mission for a book, he thinks, and I did not sign on to go joyriding with a madwoman who sometimes kills her passengers, and then he thinks, Really, are you really going to give up the chance to see the universe, and go back to working in a book store and reading Star Trek after this? Knowing that it is hopelessly inaccurate and outdated as a conception of the universe, and that reality is even more fantastic? Just because you might die at the hands of an alien with a police box that's actually a time machine? John Arcturus Smith, I am disappointed in you._

John gives up on his grip as hopeless, and allows himself to be flung across the room. His ribs collide painfully with the railing, but then the vortex or hyperspace or whatever it is that they're traveling through comes to an end, and he can push himself upright and stand straight. The Doctor watches him with her chin down and her arms crossed. 'So tell me about this star,' he says, and gives her a grin that, he hopes, is nearly as mad as her own.

 

Technologically impaired and impeded by locusts Leadworth may be, but John has access to a computer, and he has seen photos taken by the Hubble Telescope. He has some idea of what a supernova is supposed to look like: big rings of colorful particles, set against a dark, star-studded landscape. Magnificent, majestic, reminding him that he is a very small speck in an inconceivably large universe. John is prepared to be suitably humbled by the experience.

The Doctor checks a row of numbers and taps them. 'T-minus two minutes to supernova. Here, put these on.' She hands John a pair of sunglasses. He turns them over, examining the amber-tinted lenses set in impressively thick frames that would put his grandmother's spectacles to shame.

'Do they show x-rays?' he asks hopefully.

The look that she casts him can only be described as withering, but she softens it with an amused smile. 'No, they _block out_ x-rays. We're about a light-year away from the supernova, and that’s enough to turn your eyes into jelly if you don't block out most of the light. The TARDIS can only do so much. No offense, old girl.' She pats the wall and puts on her own pair of sunglasses. 'We know you do your best. _On_ , Mr. Smith.'

John consoles himself with the reminder that there are no mirrors on the TARDIS, and that there is no one around to see how silly he must look. To his surprise, the glasses have absolutely no effect on the color of the room around him, at least not to the extent that everything turns some weird color. No, it's more like the colors are the same, but there's more to them, somehow. Especially when he turns around to ask the Doctor what that's all about, and discovers that the glass column in the center of the TARDIS is now a brilliant neon green, with flickers of other colors at the edges.

'Ninety seconds,' says the Doctor. It makes John somewhat anxious, given that his only other experience with her counting down nearly resulted in the world going to hell while he fumbled for a lamp plug. But then she flies past him and throws open the doors, and they are floating in space. John gapes. His mouth actually drops open as his vision fills with the burning opalescent light, half the size of the moon, visible past the threshold. It dominates the tiny sliver of space he can see through the door of the TARDIS; beyond it, other stars speckle the black: not white or yellow, but green and blue and purple sparks that stain the void beyond and turn it into a muted Van Gogh of light. John risks the Doctor's wrath by peeping over the rims of his sunglasses, and is only mildly surprised when the colors fade out to white.

'Glasses on. Do you like being able to see, shop boy?' The Doctor flicks her fingers at him. 'Come on, sit down. Enjoy the show, it only lasts about three seconds.' She sits down and dangles her legs off the threshold into empty space. John contemplates this for exactly two seconds before he grins and sits down in the doorway beside her, copying her pose.  
'Some kind of force field?' he asks, waving a hand into the air outside of the TARDIS, where there absolutely should not be air.

The Doctor snorts. ''Force field'? Yeah, if you want to be completely boring about it. Shut up and watch.' She tilts her head and points at the closest star. 'See that one right there? In sixty-three seconds, that is going to collapse in on itself, and then everything is going to get really, really bright. If you're lucky, you'll get to see some escaping dark matter with these bad boys.' One finger taps the frames of her sunglasses. 'If you're not lucky, you'll still get a fantastic light show.'

John does an involuntary shimmy in place at the prospect. He tries to imagine the look on his grandmother's face if he were to tell her about this. _I saw a star die, Gran. Oh did you, my boy? Back in my day, we called those fireflies._ And he'd laugh, and explain what it looked like, and with any luck he could conjure up that wistful expression that she sometimes gets when his imagination ran away with him. She says it reminds her of herself when she was a little younger than him, and refuses to elaborate further. He suspects she had a deeply traumatic encounter with science back when Einstein was the Einstein of his day, and this is why she sticks to crafts and never allowed him any corrosive materials in test tubes as a child.

'Three ... two ... one ...' whispers the Doctor, eyes wide behind the lenses. John drags himself back to the present, stomach coiled tight with anticipation. E0102 continues to burn, five kilometers away; in the instant before it goes supernova, John thinks he sees a small, dark blue body passing through space between them and the star. Then the star turns a burnt orange color and leaves afterimages dancing in John's vision as it rapidly condenses itself into a barely-visible pinprick, after which the entire field of space visible through the door of the TARDIS goes blindingly amber. Even through the glasses, John is unprepared for the intensity, which throws him backwards with a punch that feels like an enormous sunburn. His world boils down to heat, light, and a pounding in the back of his head where it connected with the concrete entrance; it remains that way for an indeterminate amount of time, which feels like only a few seconds until the shock wave has passed through him. The light is no less intense, but the addition of other colors makes it somewhat bearable, and the TARDIS must be doing something with the heat because that simmers down to a bearable level. John props himself up with his hands, and his head spins as though he's been lying down for an extended period of time.

Next to him, the Doctor is in the process of picking herself up as well, and the grin on her face is, metaphorically, nearly as blinding as the supernova itself. 'That is _beautiful_ ,' she says.

John can think of several dozen replies to that statement, but, finding all of them either inadequate or rude, looks away and out. If he squints, he thinks he can make out different layers to the explosion: the white light that passed through the TARDIS (and now he understands the sunglasses), and now the streamers of different sets of particles that emerge from the center of the explosion in smoke rings. At the very, very center, so that it makes his eyes water to look straight at it, is a knot of star material in that same orange as when it first began to explode. The heat presses in at him, past the force field. He could swear it's coming in layers like the gases, or whatever material it is that's giving off the light. And the more he thinks about it, the more he finds himself beaming fit to match the Doctor. A star, an actual star, something burning and functioning for billions and billions of years, and he, John Smith from a tiny little town in the UK, was there when it stopped functioning and started being something else.

'That was brilliant,' he agrees. 'Did you know it was going to do that? The ...' He mimes falling over backwards again, arms flailing.

'We didn't come out near the very first shock waves,' says the Doctor, which doesn't really answer his question. 'It was tricky timing it, you know. Park far enough away that no one loses any skin, and you have to account for light travel, so we've actually come out four hours and fifty-seven minutes after it happened.'

John wiggles his fingers. 'Sciencey stuff.'

The Doctor laughs at him. 'You bet.'

They turn their attention towards the supernova. John watches the outward movement of the star's remnants. It reminds him of clouds scudding across the sky on a windy day. 'Was there anything around this particular star? I thought I saw a planet,' he says.

'E0102 A, locally known as Trugxom. Well, I say locally. There weren't any life forms on it anymore. They died off when the star got too hot.' The Doctor's voice is carefully neutral, but when John tears his eyes off of a thick curl of green gas on the outer edges of the supernova, he can see the unhappy hunch of her shoulders. It leaves him with the feeling that this is where he does his bit and says something comforting, but without the instinct for what to say. It sinks in that he is a long, long way from home, and there were alien life forms here once, and alien life forms, that also sinks into him in a way that little blobs of light floating about at home hadn't. What did they look like is on the tip of his tongue to ask the Doctor, before he realizes that this may be an insensitive question. So he swallows it, and watches the green gas spiral outward at a slowing pace in silence.

 

'I'm hungry. Do you want to eat?' the Doctor asks, once the green plume of gas from the center of the supernova has spiraled out to meet the other layers, and cooled down to an odd lime color.

'What? Oh.' Now that the subject has been brought up, John realizes that he has no idea when he ate last, and his stomach feels scooped-out and hollow. 'Yeah, okay.' He starts to get up; the Doctor puts a hand on his shoulder to indicate that he should stay where he is.

'We can eat here. I'll be back, don't fall.' She vanishes, her footsteps echoing. John leans back on his hands and watches the green outer shell drift closer to him -- okay, drift very very fast, but from this distance, it's barely bigger in his field of vision than the sun would be at home. _Five hours in the past_ , he reminds himself, and grins, because this is his life: sitting in the door of a time machine, legs dangling into space with nothing but the word of an alien that the local environment would continue to be earthlike, and not a vacuum of heat intense enough to fry him before he could say _bugger_. And to think that less than thirty hours ago, he was trying to help an old woman find a book.

Of course, that old woman had turned out to be some sort of enemy of the Doctor's, and had then tried to preemptively destroy the Earth. John snorted and kicked a foot at the remnants of the planet below him. Life is funny like that. He tries to picture her coming in, buying the book, so that he can help the Doctor when they go off after her, and draws a blank. Long hair, he remembers that because his grandmother disapproves so strongly of older women with hair past their shoulders. No idea why. He always suspected it had something to do with envy, because she was always going on about how his mother had always wanted to be able to braid her hair like the other girls. And she'd never let her. John had thought that was a bit silly the first time she told him, at least inasmuch as a fifteen-year-old boy cared about girls' fashion. Even if it was fashion connected to his family history. John had never been much one for history, he'd never seen the point when there were much more interesting things that came in books.

And now, real life.

The Doctor sits down next to him and hands him a plate of food which includes something that looks like a turtle on the half-shell. Space turtle, he decides, and the remnants of his train of thought, such as it were, vanish completely in the wake of this new and interesting diversion.

'Is this safe for me to eat?' he asks.

'Totally harmless to almost every known physiology in your galaxy,' she says. 'Excluding the Common Aspidella, incidentally, but still, that accident produced you humans in the end, so no harm done, right?' When John halts the progress of his fork towards his plate, she laughs. 'I'm kidding. It's ... an inside joke.' Her laughter fades, and she hunches her shoulders, turning away to look out at the supernova.

John stabs experimentally at the food she has provided, and bites into it with great caution. The flavor reminds him a great deal of the falafel he had at a friend's house in primary school. The friend's family had laughed when his face turned bright red, and given him milk and bread to cool down the fire in his mouth. It's not quite so potent, and the texture is very different. Altogether, it is such a surreal combination of taste and feel and the situation in which he is doing both that it careens right off John's mental scale of weirdness and loops right back around to 'comfortable'. Forever afterward, John knows, he will associate the taste of space turtle with sitting next to the Doctor and watching a star die just outside the front door.

They eat in relative silence for a while, save for the Doctor remembering that she also brought out 'this ... thing, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be' which turns out to be coconut juice. John drinks it out of a plastic orange beaker set down on the step behind him. It's nice.

'Fine,' the Doctor says, quite out of nowhere. 

John swallows his mouthful of space turtle behind his hand before he even attempts an answer. 'Fine. Yes. Obviously. Fine what?'

'My partner always hated it when I didn't explain exactly what was going on. Even if it was embarrassing, or, or weird, or something I knew he wouldn't like ... he always wanted me to tell him anyway. For once, I was hoping to get someone who just didn't care.' The Doctor looks at him like it's his own fault that he's curious about his host.  
John raises his eyebrows, and takes another enormous bite of turtle to disguise the fact that he's not completely sure what she's talking about.

The Doctor rolls her eyes. 'Like I said, fine. Anyone who didn't ask questions would probably have so little imagination they wouldn't be any fun, anyway.'

'Or too much imagination,' John points out.

'Right.' She points her fork at him. 'So. I am going to tell you what we're doing and where we're going, and why we're going there. Your job is to shut up and not ask stupid questions. Got it?'

Oh. Genocidal mad woman with a box, right. This is exciting. John shoves a bit of bready something-or-other into his mouth, which probably makes him look like a goldfish but effectively stifles his powers of speech. He gives her a thumbs-up and crinkles his eyes with anticipation.

The Doctor folds her hands. 'A long time ago ... no ... Sometimes in the past ... wait, how does that even translate? That's not right. Never mind. When I was younger, there was a planet. My planet. Gallifrey. It was ... beautiful.' A wistful smile crosses her face. 'You think this is magical, you should have seen the capital city at its height. It would take your breath away. My people lived there, the Time Lords. There were millions of us, just like you humans. I had parents, and I had a husband. His name was ... well, we called him the Centurion. It's a long story.'

'Just like you're the Doctor?' John wants to know. 'I knew it, I knew that wasn't your real name!'

The Doctor glares at him. 'It's my name now. I chose it. Do you want me to continue?'

'Yes. Sorry.'

She nods. 'The Centurion and I used to travel together. We'd see the universe, pick people up along the way, save the worlds. The other Time Lords weren't too happy about the way we did things, but we didn't listen. We had a daughter, too, for a while, but she was stolen from us.' As she speaks, her eyes harden, and she rests her chin on her hands. Her plate sits beside her, half-eaten despite her proclamations of hunger.

John thinks about the huge console, and the way it would have looked with three people piloting it. 'What happened?' he asks.

'We got her back, eventually. All grown up. Living in the Gamma Forest. It turned out we'd known her for years before she was born, and she never let on that she was our daughter.' The corners of her mouth lift. John tries to reconcile that particular paradox in his mind. 'We took her back to Gallifrey. The Centurion became a nurse, and our daughter became a professor and called herself River Song.'

John looks at her smooth face - she doesn't look more than thirty years old - and waits for her to continue. His curiosity is nowhere near satisfied, but given how happy she looks, thinking about her family, and how empty the TARDIS is now, he doesn't want to push her in the wrong direction and make her unhappy. (He's not as tactless as his grandmother tells him he is, he's _not_.)

The Doctor snitches a bite of his dinner. She swallows. 'There was another species, who fought the Time Lords, called the Daleks. It got worse and worse, over time - I mean - well - across time. In the end, there was a war. Like World War Two, you might compare it to, but without any English countryside you could send your kids to. And with soldiers who kept getting brought back to life to fight. Over and over and over again, until you were sick with it.' She ducks her head and lets her hair fall over her face. 'The Centurion got caught up in it. He helped save people, until the first time he got killed. After that. After that, he was just another soldier.

'River and I ran. I was too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with a Time War, and she was too clever for them to catch.' She looks up and smiles at him.

John stares down at his dinner. He doesn't find that he's as hungry as he thought he was. In this light, his cake-baking achievements, however heroic they were, seem significantly less interesting. That's not fair of her, he thinks. It's not his fault he was born human, without a chance for great, sweeping deeds. 'Well then.'

'Yep. Stopped running for long enough to time-lock the war and keep it from happening. We needed more time, to figure out how to diffuse the war. Genocide, no matter what the cause is for ... it's not really my thing.' The Doctor shrugs and clasps her hands over her knees. John follows her gaze as she stares out at the still-hot remnants of the supernova. In the center, he can see a smaller cloud of particles forming. Their appearance makes him uneasy -- too volatile, however far away they are and however safe that makes them. John considers this -- the supernova, the different stages, their watching it -- and wonders if this is a metaphor for something. Exploding planets, exploding stars, and that's why the Doctor has chosen now to bring it up.

'So ...' He waves his hand around in circles, in the general direction of the doorway. 'What happened to River?'

The Doctor licks her lips. 'The time-lock isn't a permanent solution. There's still a war going on. Has been going on, will have been going on. English is rubbish, have I mentioned that yet? My husband is still dying. I'm out here to find a way to fix this. And when I do find a way, I need someone on the other side of the lock, to send out a signal and help me pull it open. River is better at hiding than I am, as it turns out, so she stayed behind. I've been traveling for a while now, but it started to get a bit pointless, and then I nearly got someone important killed in a very nasty way, so I figured it was time to start in on saving my own world again. I've done yours enough in my lifetime. Now.' She takes John's plate, and stands up with a last lingering look at the supernova. 'I'm going to hope that the TARDIS will do the dishes, because I can't be bothered and I don't want mold on them again.'  
John scrambles to his feet as well. 'I'll take care of it.' Perhaps, he thinks, the comfortable domesticity of washing dishes, even in a very strange kitchen that looks like bits of it have been stolen from a nineteen-fifties home decorations magazine, will help him to sort through the Doctor's offhand recitation of her history. Watching the supernova expanding only serves to make him feel grumpy and insignificant, which is, he recognizes, not an appropriate mood to feel when one's traveling companion has much better reasons to be distressed. That realization only makes him more annoyed with himself; being selfless and doing the dishes will do him good.

'Oh, thanks. I knew I chose a good passenger.' The Doctor surrenders the dishes to him and sits back down, hands on her knees. 'Give me a shout if you get lost.'  
John balances his cup on top of the plates and leaves her watching the supernova with a calm that seems to him too deliberate to be genuine. He decides not to question it further.

~~*~~*~~

**Flesh and Stone**

Forty-two hours after John Smith tried to scare away starlings from outside a bookstore in a small town in England, he opens the door and sees his first alien landscape. And he would never admit this to anyone, but he nearly wets himself with excitement. 'A planet,' he crows, bouncing around the console and generally making a nuisance of himself while the Doctor lands them on the planet's surface. 'A real, actual planet!' This is, without a doubt, better than any number of Christmases or new books or old creaky houses to explore - combined. The TARDIS lands with a groaning, wheezing noise and a thump that sends John staggers sideways a couple of feet. He recovers himself against a column, and springs upright once more. His whole body itches to lunge for the door, pull it open, and see what there is to be seen, but he's read enough books to know that it would be a Bad Idea to go running out into an alien environment without any idea of what he might find.

The Doctor wiggles her fingers. 'Yep. Brand new, never been seen before - not by me, at least.' Her face lights up with a grin. It's enough to make John forget that he met her because she was on a grim, time-sensitive mission, enough to make him forget temporarily that he is here because she wanted him to help her continue that mission. The immediacy of an alien landscape puts all of that out of his mind.

'What's it called?' he asks, prepared to struggle with foreign vowels and sounds - maybe it doesn't even have a spoken name! Maybe its inhabitants speak in colors, or in clicks pitched like dog whistles.

The Doctor leans over the controls to tilt her head at the screen. 'MaiЖliiii'₰.' She draws out the word. 'Yeah. No idea, but the atmosphere's nice and Earthlike, local sentient species are the Zieftli. Oooooh.'

'What?'

'They've got tree forts!' 

The Doctor runs past him, as though she is the one who's never been to outer space before. John leaps after her with speed born of a fear of not seizing this opportunity most excellent. Speed turns to shock that causes him to forget to move his legs, which in turn results in his first contact with an alien landscape being with his face. He lies there for a moment to take inventory of his vital signs, in case the Doctor has accidentally led him into a toxic environment, but the air, though humid, comes easily enough. This makes the fact that the plant on which he has landed is deep blue all the more egregious.

 

~~*~~*~~

[Bit of context for the ending section: the Doctor time-locked Gallifrey away. She's going about hunting for a way to end the Time War and bring back her family, who have been trapped on the other side of the lock. Climax involves a big explosion of the lock, the Doctor dragging River and the Centurion out of it and John attempting to sacrifice himself but being able to escape at the last minute because Doctor Who.]

~~*~~*~~

**Untitled Last Section**

John Smith collapses onto something hard and flat. Hard, flat, and, most importantly, cool. Not the fiery inferno of an explosive time-space event. That's good, he thinks, and shuts his eyes. Maybe he isn't dead, after all; and if he is, then at least there's an afterlife to enjoy. That's exciting. He rather thinks he's earned it.

'John. John, say something. Say something, please, please don't be in a coma.' The Doctor's voice pierces through John's stunned brain and prods at the conscious bits of it. Not dead, then, unless she's kicked it, too. That would not be good.

'Humans are so ... fragile,' says a new voice - young, male, sad. Some part of John rebels at being referred to like a piece of fine crystal. With a monumental effort, he pulls a face.

'I am not fragile, and I am perfectly fine, just a bit bowled over, as you'd be if you got dragged from imminent death by time vortex,' he tries to say. It comes out as 'hnnnngh.' He aims his energies at rising from the ground, but his attempt is thwarted by arms thrown around his neck.

'Oh, thank you,' the Doctor says into his jacket.

'Give him some air, Doctor,' the other man says.

'Physical contact releases oxytocin,' a female voice chimes in. Hearing it, John decides that two mysterious people are one too many variables in this situation, and he opens his eyes.

Wherever they are, it's dimly lit, for which John is profoundly grateful. He's had enough light to last him a lifetime. The surface on which he is lying, propped on his elbows, appears to be the dark, polished stone floor of a vaulted hall in a cathedral of some kind. The Doctor is kneeling next to him, hair falling out of its bun and arm still protectively around his shoulders. Beyond her, the owner of the first voice stands, arms folded in on himself and worry creasing his birdlike features. He is dressed in some sort of uniform that, while foreign to John, still proclaims itself to be military. Sitting on a bench beside him is a middle-aged woman whose curly golden hair fans out around her head like a halo. She regards John with a sly, evaluative air until he makes eye contact, at which point her attention shifts to the other man. 'See? Better already,' she says to him, lifting an eyebrow.  
John gives her a smile. He tries for words again, jaw working in preparation. 'I feel,' he begins. The attention of the other three snaps to him, and the Doctor sits back to let him speak. 'I feel like I just got hit over the head with a lemon.' Wait, that's not right. 'A lemon wrapped around a brick,' he clarifies.

'Ah,' says the other man. 'That sounds about right.'

'Did it work? Is everything ... how it ought to be? Not locked away or vanishing into cracks?' John sits up and stretches his arms out in front of him to examine the damage: hardly singed from passing through the heart of the explosion. Good old TARDIS.

'The crack here closed right after we pulled you through. We'll have to do a bit of scouting about, but I think we might have done it,' the Doctor says. Her eyes are bright in spite of the smile on her face, or perhaps alongside it. John has never understood happy crying. 'Now, up you get.' The Doctor scrambles to her feet and reaches back down to him; John allows himself to be pulled upright. He sways when the Doctor releases his hands, but despite feeling as though his whole body has just been put through a meat press, he doesn't actually fall over.

'John,' says the Doctor, 'this is the Centurion.'

The other man steps forwards and waves. 'Hi.'

John looks from him to the Doctor, and back again. 'He's your husband?' he asks, smile stretching wide until it feels like his face isn't big enough to contain it all. 'Really?'

'Really really,' says the Centurion. He sounds wrong-footed, as though expecting John to make a joke at his expense.

'No, no, that's fantastic! You're alive! Haha!' John wiggles his fingers at the Centurion. 'Which means I really have to ask: why 'the Centurion'? Bit of a funny name, isn't it?'

'You weren't kidding,' the Centurion mutters to the Doctor, but he doesn't sound displeased. John waits patiently for his answer. 'When the Doctor and I were students, she thought it'd be a good idea to steal,' -

'Borrow,' the Doctor interrupts.

'Fine, _borrow_ Professor Song's TARDIS, and go exploring. Then she - the TARDIS, not the Doctor, I think - stranded me in eight century Britain for forty years, so I joined the Roman army. It was something of a formative experience,' he concludes, looking down accusingly at the woman next to him.

'It was one of my favorite stories you used to tell me,' she says, beaming at him. 'I look forwards to doing that one day.' As if anticipating John's next question, she stands and holds out her hand. 'I'm River Song.'

John frowns, discards his confusion as less important than having the Doctor's family like him, and lunges forward to shake her hand. 'River Song! Delighted, I've heard loads about you - and you too, Centurion, of course,' he assures the Centurion. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the Doctor smile tightly. Ooh, she owes him now.

'I'm sure,' says River. 'Mum's been filling us in, so we've heard quite a lot about you, too.'

'Most of it doesn't make total sense, but we'll sort it all out eventually,' adds the Centurion. 'Nice work.'

John can't put his finger on why, precisely, this is the moment when he becomes aware that he's standing in a cathedral in the-Doctor-only-knows-where, talking to a family of time-traveling aliens several hundred years older than him, but it is, and he has to take a moment to be quietly overwhelmed. He gapes around at them as though he's never seen them before in his life. 'Hello,' he says. 'Where are we?'

'Martian colony, twenty-third century, recently abandoned,' says the Doctor. 'We were looking for the nearest crack, time-wise.'

'Practically back home.' John tries to smile. It's funny, how one day London seems an insurmountable distance away, and a year later, the next planet over feels claustrophobically close to home. Even if he's been dead for two hundred years, chronologically.

'Nah, you can't even see your cute little planet from here.' The Doctor punches him in the arm. 'Come on, let's go.' She links hands with the Centurion, and holds her other hand out to John.

So that's it, then. A heavy vise settles around John's chest as his mind jumps ahead; he pictures himself stepping out of the TARDIS onto Main Street, Leadworth; going back to his grandmother's house, sleeping in the same bed he's had since he was seven, then waking up and going to work and reading Dragonriders of Pern novels whole above him, there are aliens zipping around in space ships and fleets with their own books and battles he'll never know about. And no one will ever know about the adventures he did have. He can't exactly go around telling the good people of the town that he helped save whole planets from destruction. They think he's enough of a loon as it is. 'Okay, then,' he says, voice barely above a whisper.

'What're you looking so glum about?' River tilts her head after her parents, motioning for him to follow. John tries to formulate an answer that doesn't sound either petulant or ungrateful.

'River, where'd you park the TARDIS?' asks the Doctor.

'She's invisible; should be right about,'-

The Centurion extends a hand, and smacks against an unseen surface five inches from his face. 'Yep, here it is,' he sighs.

John is still puzzling and knotting his fingers together when River drags him into her TARDIS. He blinks. Up until this point, he had - totally reasonably, he defends himself - assumed that every TARDIS looked the same. Whatever the state of the exterior is when it's visible, this is clearly not true for the interior. The architecture tends more towards the tree-like and wooded; even the cables trailing out from under the controls are curiously vine-like. The central column appears to be filled with green liquid, and little darker green blobs float through it. River goes straight for a knobbly lever like a tree root and twists it several times. 

The Doctor presses her back against a wall, her mouth a straight line as she watches her daughter and her TARDIS. John thinks of the explosion he left behind, and a wave of guilt sweeps over him. He starts forwards - to do what, he's not sure, he'll think of something by the time he gets there - and then trips over his own feet as the Centurion puts a hand on her shoulder, and she leans into the contact. Right, she's got her family back, who are slightly psychic and hundreds of years old and probably - definitely - better at comforting the Doctor than John, even with what he's picked up in the past year. He settles on watching the Doctor watching River.

The Doctor catches his eye and gestures at him, waving him over with a smile that, even to John's untrained eye, looks forced. 'Come here,' she says. He stumbles past River as she races around the console and they take off. He stops short in front of the Doctor. 'I'm sorry about your TARDIS,' he says, and forces himself to meet her eyes. 'I'm sorry that she couldn't be saved,' he adds to the Centurion, because from what the Doctor has told him, it was his ship, too.

He's a little surprised when the Centurion puts a hand on his shoulder as well. He looks as though he's about to say something, then bobs his head, swallows, and pats them both.  
'It's not your fault.' The Doctor blinks rapidly several times, so that her eyes aren't quite so bright. 'But thank you.'

'I,' - The Centurion breaks off as the TARDIS lands with a crash that sends the three of them (River maintains an iron grip on a flowerlike contraption welded to the view screen) flying sideways and into the floor. John wriggles out from underneath the Centurion, tries not to elbow the Doctor in the face, and springs to his feet.

'Where are we?' he asks River.

She releases the view screen and shakes herself. 'The Gamma Forest. I'll have grown up here,' she says.

'And ... when are we?' he remembers to ask next.

'Thirteen century, about ten years after I left. It should be quiet; we'll have at least a day to regroup.'

'Does it still have that funny little glacial waterfall outside your settlement yet?' asks the Doctor.

River Song leans towards John to murmur, 'I may have caused that when I was brought here, but don't tell Mum, it'll only upset her.' In a raised voice, she says, 'Of course, they haven't started terraforming yet.'

'Excellent. I could use a bath.' The Doctor grabs the Centurion's hand and tugs him to the door. River sails after them, and John follows hot on her heels. More planets! Another opportunity to stick around and explore, with a Doctor who has most of her family back now and isn't constantly worried; it sounds brilliant, and John is in no hurry to be dropped back in Leadworth.

The outside of River's TARDIS, as it turns out, is not a police box, but a very old, squat tree. And if this is where she grew up, John can understand why; it looks very much like every other tree in the forest where they have landed. The air is cool, but not uncomfortably so, and given the temperatures with which John has recently become familiar, he wouldn't complain unless he were on the verge of freezing anyway. The sun is low in the sky, and much smaller than John is used to seeing on a planet that is otherwise very Earth-like. Further observation than that, however, will have to wait, because the Doctor is climbing into the low-hanging branches of one of the trees, and the Centurion is looking around him with an expression of wonder that makes John's heart twist. It occurs to him to look at events from his perspective: embroiled in an endless space battle, alone, which is then interrupted by a massive explosion and the sudden arrival of his wife and daughter. (And a human stranger, John reminds himself, this is his narrative too.) They then go to an apparently calm, peaceful forest on another planet.

Yeah, John would be staring, too. He approaches the Centurion and reaches out with the intention of expressing empathy, realizes he doesn't really know what to do with his arms, doesn't really know the man at all, even. He forges ahead anyway, and grips the Centurion's shoulder, because it seems like the right thing to do.  
'It's funny,' the Centurion whispers. It doesn't appear that he's talking to John in particular. 'I can remember being - out there, you know? Fighting. But it's all gone funny in my head, like,' followed by a phrase that sounds like raspy singing, and which John knows to be something temporal and technical that the TARDIS can't translate into even approximate English terms. The reminder unsettles him.

The Doctor frowns. 'That's not right. You were supposed to forget.'

'We could have miscalculated. It's not like there's a precedent,' River reminds her.

'Yeah, but it shouldn't. That's the whole point.'

'Could be because you helped to pull me out,' John offers. 'Through the heart of the explosion?'

'Maybe,' says the Doctor, tilting her head. 'We'll have to find out tomorrow. First, I need to sleep.' She stretches out along the curve of the wide tree branch, as if she has every intention of dropping off right then and there.

John drops his hand from the Centurion's shoulder to take a step closer. 'What happens tomorrow?' he asks tentatively. 

The Doctor and River look at each other, talking via small movements of their eyes that, realistically, only take a few seconds, but seem to go on for an eternity. John's heart hammers in his chest, and his insides twist so hard, so quickly, that he fears he will throw up all over River's shoes as he waits for someone to speak.

'We can't be sure that it'll all be okay, now that we've got rid of the technology. Especially not if everyone has some memory of what was going on towards the end.' The Doctor glances at the Centurion. 'There are lots of other things, little things that need sorting further along to make sure that everyone stays on the right path.'

'No more 'final sanctions',' agrees the Centurion.

'Or trying to purge my books.' River's face temporarily transforms into a mask of fury.

'Good girl,' says the Doctor.

John looks between the three of them: a family, separated across time and space, but still in sync. It makes his heart ache rather painfully, in a way that has nothing to do with returning to Earth, and everything to do with unexpected happiness for them. He doesn't exactly run to push them into one big alien, Time Lord hug, because it would probably knock the Doctor out of her tree. He does rub his hands together to relieve some of the pressure building in his chest. 'Not done saving the world yet?' he says.

The Doctor gives him a half-smile. 'Never are, are we. What do you say?'

'I say ...' John starts to speak before he really thinks about it. Then it hits him, and he stops. He presses his hands together, opens his mouth, closes it, and grins. 'I can help?' he asks.

'Sure. Washing dishes, repairing cables, taking notes, I'm sure we can find something for you to do around the TARDIS,' says River with a sly grin.

'Really?' he squeaks.

'Yeah. What did you think we were going to do, drop you off back on Earth without so much as a 'oh, thanks for helping me defeat Entropy and resurrect my species'?' The Doctor snorts.

John might explode with -- well, he can't say happiness, because it's more complicated than that. It has to do with being a part of something bigger than himself; with being allowed to continue traveling with this strange, broken-and-repaired family; with not only seeing the wonders of the universe, and not only doing the big important things, but the little important things, too. Things like hugging the Doctor when she needed it, and helping aliens in intergalactic shopping malls find their way back to their gene pool.

'Thank you,' he says. 'You never know, and now that you two are back,' -- he beams at River Song and at the Centurion — 'Thank you.'

'Nah, we never kicked out the Doctor's hitchhikers, even before all this,' says the Centurion, somewhat awkwardly.

'So you're coming.' The Doctor sits up, and swings down from the tree. She takes the Centurion's hand on one side, and River's on the right. Her face is clearer, freer of worry than John can ever remember, despite what lies ahead.

John faces the three of them and squares his shoulders. 'To the end of the universe,' he says, spreading his arms and losing the battle to keep himself from laughing with delight.


	2. L'appel du vide (Doctor Who)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First-person Amy Pond, the first part of a longer story that I’d wanted to tell about Amy, Rory, the Doctor, and Atahualpa, because I am a history geek.

The Roman Empire used to be my favorite subject when I was a kid; democracy was boring, everyone does it these days, and anyway that’s not how the real world really works. I didn’t get to vote on whether I got sent to those psychiatrists; at least the Romans were honest about their intentions.

I haven’t been so keen on them lately, I know it was an alternate timeline or something like that (the Doctor tried to explain the exact mechanics of it once; he lost me once he started talking about string theory) but fact is the Silence turned my boyfriend into a Roman robot and a whole bunch of them tried to kill the Doctor and me, and even if they weren’t technically real, they still thought they were, which is all that really matters in the end.

The TARDIS hasn’t quite figured this out yet, apparently, because I went to the library to find a constellation map and came out with a book about Roman military tactics instead. I figure why not, let’s try this again. I wander back to the control room to find Rory and ask him if he remembers anything useful from the book, but when I get there, he and the Doctor are tinkering underneath the controls again. My boys, bonding over electronics (even if they are Time Lord electronics and I doubt that Rory understands much of what he’s doing), it warms the cockles of my heart.

‘Do you see the thingy with all the wires coming out of the top, the blue one? Shaped like a banana,’ the Doctor calls. ‘Don’t touch that one, it bites. Gave me a scar on my arm once … I wasn’t much to look at that time around anyway …’ 

I snicker and sit down on the stairs to watch as Rory digs around in one of the chests on the other side of the room. ‘No touching the biting banana, right. What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?’

‘Ah … ‘ Sparks fly from the console, and the Doctor jumps in his swing, and I decide against reading. This is much more entertaining. ‘Do you remember that tool we used to fix the dimensional fold stabilizer last week?’

Rory dives headfirst into a chest that looks like it once held buried treasure, and disappears up to his waist. Something clatters a long way off inside, which worries me just a little bit. ‘Yeah, got it!’ he calls back up.

‘No, not that, I was going to say it looks exactly like that, but pink.’

I snort. ‘Pink?’

‘Yes! Color is important.’ The Doctor goes off on one of his rants about why color warps the space-time continuum or something like that, but mid-sentence I hear a snick coming from down the hallway from whence I just came, like someone flicking two bits of metal together.

‘Doctor?’ I lean over to ask. ‘Did you give River another wristwatch time-travel thing?’

‘No! Absolutely not. Why?’ The Doctor breaks off his speech and leans over backwards in his swing until we can see eye to eye. (Literally. Metaphorically, I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen.) 

‘That, that sound, didn’t you hear that?’ I imitate it to the best of my ability, probably looking ridiculous, but it works: the Doctor takes off those stupid goggles of his, and his face lights up like I’ve just given him a present.

‘That’ll be the mailbox,’ he says, like I should have known better than to question the existence of a mailbox on a time-travelling space ship. (A time-travelling space ship with a ballroom, as of at least last week.)

From the depths of the treasure chest thing, Rory heaves himself upright with a bright pink contraption attached to his head. ‘The mailbox? Do we even have a mailbox?’ he asks.  
It’s hard to tell, because the Doctor flips himself upright and his back is to me, but he sounds slightly injured. ‘Of course the TARDIS has got a mailbox. It’s just outside the kitchen.’

‘But why? Don’t you usually just get letters through the psychic paper?’ Rory tries to take the contraption off of his head, and fails.

The Doctor takes hold of the pink thing with both hands, and wrenches. Somewhat worryingly, it does nothing. ‘Yes, if the person sending the message uses writing,’ he says. ‘Open your mind, Rory, it’s a great, big, impossible universe out there, do you really think that every single intelligent species in the history of space and time makes little marks on flat surfaces to communicate?’

‘Yeah, okay, I’m just going to go see what came in.’ I close my book and get up: mail on the TARDIS is definitely more interesting than any sort of military tactics the Romans could have thought up. Alien mail is even better. ‘Rory, what is that thing?’

He appears to be struggling with the pink thing attached to his head; I pause, half-afraid of attack from within. ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to do this?’ he says helplessly. I could swear it makes a little shrieking noise as he and the Doctor combine their efforts, and it finally parts company with his head.

Shaking my head, and pretending that I’m totally fine with inanimate tools deciding to go on the attack, I jog up the stairs and down the hallway.

Living in the TARDIS is a bit like what I imagine it would be like to live at Hogwarts. I keep meaning to ask the Doctor if she’s a fan or something, because it’s kind of ridiculous. Half the time, the kitchen is down the hall to the left of our bedroom, behind a door that was definitely not built for humanoid use. The other half of the time, that door leads to a weird room full of what look like hamster mazes, and the kitchen is one floor down without any door to close at all. The question is: does the mailbox follow the kitchen, or the door? I’m about to find out.

The dodecahedron door opens on the maze room, and past that is someone else’s old bedroom, so I shut the door on that mystery and run down the find real stairs this time. I reach the kitchen, this time, and look past it. I’ve never noticed it before, but here it is: a bright blue mailbox, on a wooden post growing out of the parquet floor. Its little red flag is up to signal incoming mail. I open it, and two things fall out.

The first is a brightly colored magazine with a holographic cover, showing something that looks like a cross between WALL-E and a Dalek. When I pick it up, dust puffs off it, so I assume it’s just something else that’s been forgotten back here. The second object is different. At first glance, it just looks like a pile of colored twine with knots in it, but once I shake it out, it becomes clear that it’s actually a series of strings, different lengths, with the ends all tied to the thickest string of all.

Huh.

‘Doctor!’ I call, running back into the main room. ‘Doctor, what’s [Faintly Suggestive Magazine Title]? It’s all dusty, says it was published in …’ I hold up the magazine to the light as I reach the control room. ‘Year five seven three four. Uh, slash acorn. Wait, isn’t that a coordinate,’ —

‘No no no, don’t touch that!’ When I came in, the Doctor had been trying to apply the whatsit to a bunch of loose cables underneath the controls; now he leaps out of his swing, hands waving as he makes for the stairs. I watch as he trips over an open toolbox before he can reach the main level.

‘What is it, robot porn or something?’ I drape the bundle of strings over my arm and flick open the magazine. It’s quite a shock when I start to make sense of what it is and realize that I’m almost right — interspecies robot porn. I raise my eyebrows; the situation seems to require it. Below, the Doctor manages to extricate himself from the mess he’s made; he dashes up to the stairs and snatches it from me from across the railing.

‘That is not mine,’ he announces, with an unconvincing air. He paces back towards the controls, shoving it into his pocket as he goes. (Rory frowns at me; I wiggle my fingers at the Doctor for his benefit, but in the end we can only shrug.) ‘A, ah, former companion of mine, left in a hurry before he could cancel all of his subscriptions, I have got to talk to him about that …’ He spins around and points at me with both hands. ‘But that’s not important, that’s old news, the question is, what is that?’

‘This?’ I find the connecting cord and shake out the bundle so that it all hangs down like a curtain. A bumpy, irregular curtain. ‘No idea.’

Rory climbs out of the pit and squints at it. ‘Maybe one of those skirt things? You know.’ He fans out his fingers at his hips and tries to sway back and forth. It takes me a second to realize that he’s trying – badly – to imitate hula dancing. I feel a warm rush of affection for him and his stupid antics.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, can you imagine the waistline you’d need to fit into this?’ I hold up the contraption for him to see better. ‘I’d have to be deformed. Or an alien,’ I concede, because we are in a space ship and I don’t want the resident alien to feel excluded. 

He doesn’t seem to notice the effort. ‘A hula skirt?’ The Doctor dashes up the stairs and takes it out of my hands. ‘Really? I mean, I suppose …’ H scowls at the strings. ‘But no. This is a qhipu.’

‘A what?’ I ask, in the same instant that Rory does the same.

‘A message; here, Amy, hold this.” The Doctor passes it back to me and leans in uncomfortably close to … count knots and mutter to himself. Sure, why not? I cock an eyebrow at him, for all the good it does.

‘So … what’s it say? I ask, after enough time has passed that he’s got to have something figured out by now.

The Doctor doesn’t answer for another few seconds, finishing off the last two bits of strong. ‘It’s numbers,’ he says. ‘A numerical description of a particular point in space and time.’

‘Coordinates?’ Rory pops up next to him, with his hand stuffed in his pockets.

‘No, that’s the odd thing, it’s – oh. Oh.’ The ‘I’m so pleased with myself I could burst’ expression slides off the Doctor’s face. He hitches it back on in a second, but I’m unnerved all the same.

‘What’s ‘oh’?’ I snap the qhipu-thing together, wrap it around my wrist. It makes a nice bracelet.

Apparently — as the Doctor explains between excited shouts and more whizz-bang noises than can really be necessary — the last part of it says ‘Come help’ in some weird numerical way, so obviously we’re off. Rory makes a fuss about having nearly been decapitated getting out the impossible whatsit, only for the Doctor to up and decide that the TARDIS’ temporospatial stabilizers can be reorganized another day.

As I’m hanging onto the controls for dear life, getting thrown around the Time Vortex, it occurs to me that maybe the Doctor should have finished fiddling with anything that had ‘stabilizer’ in the description before we were off. I swear the TARDIS tosses us around more than usual, and then I want to laugh because how many people can say they’ve spent enough time in a space ship to —know what ‘usual’ feels like? But land we do – finally.

‘Where are we?’ I ask, once I can stagger to my feet, but I swing my arms like nothing ever happened to throw me off. It irritates Rory when I do that.

‘I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. I fed the numbers for the time and place into the TARDIS. And I’ve got a hunch.’ The Doctor opens the door a crack to check where we’ve landed. Rory any I both rush to get there, but he slams the door shut again just as we get there. Honestly, does he think he can just hog all the interesting things to himself?  
The Doctor announces that we seem to have landed in the middle of the Spanish army. I start to get excited, because the Spanish army in the Middle Ages? Again, who in Leadworth could say that they’d actually met Pizarro? Not that there’s anything more exciting than other planets full of transdimensional aliens that would have made Lovecraft stab his eyes out in terror, unless it’s the fact that sometimes the sixth-dimensional horrors need saving from even more eighth-dimensional buckyballs, and we get to help save them. And okay, maybe going into my own planet’s past is a little boring by comparison. But just rethink that last sentence, and tell me I’m not lucky.

‘Amy.’ Rory is tugging on my sleeve now, and pointing at the door. ‘Amy, he’s doing it again.’ I snap back to reality — a reality where the Doctor has just, in spite of just telling us to be prepared for danger, gone running out the door to greet sixteenth-century Earth.

Somehow, I don’t think Pizarro is going to be impressed. ‘Oh god. Get the flashlight, or something. Something weapon-y. Just in case?’ Rory looks at his right hand for a moment with a peculiar expression. I grab his hand with both of my own and kiss the knuckles. He swallows and nods.

I open the door again, as quietly as I can, and press my eye to the crack. Through it, I can make out a whole bunch of dead bodies, human bodies, wearing bright patterned clothing that is definitely not European. They lie sprawled on a ground covered in weird cobblestone – I doubt that it was made with horses or carriages in mind, the stones are so narrow and the cracks are so wide. But then I hear clopping off to the left, and notice the horde of men in armor spread out in a circle around the TARDIS. That’d be the Spanish, then.

‘Who’s he?’ I feel Rory against my back, and rearrange myself so that he can lean over me and see, too. He presses something into my hand that, when I glance down, turns out to be a long, heavy black object with a ray gun thing at the end.

‘What’s this?’ I ask. ‘I said weapon-y, this is that deadlock lock pick.’

‘I’m counting on it looking so dangerous that we don’t need to use them at all,’ Rory whispers, followed by a cry of, ‘You came for me!’ in a peculiar accent.

I guess that what they say about missing the trees for the forest is true, because somehow, I missed the real reason that the army is arranged in a circle. It’s comforting to know that they weren’t expecting us.

Anyway. The Doctor’s rushed out to flail (and by flail, I mean he’s getting way too far inside the man’s personal bubble in order to bob up and down and talk at him) at the only man with brown skin and the colorful woven patterns on his clothing. Armor-clothing, and a feathered headdress. ‘Yes of course I came, I always come, I’m the Doctor. Now who are you? And how did you get my address?’

‘I? I am Atahualpa, favored son of Huayna Capac and the true Sapa Inca. As for your address, we will discuss that later, Doctor. Where is your army?’ says the man in the feathers. Atahualpa.

‘Oh god,’ says Rory. ‘Oh god, um, Amy. That – Ata – whatever. Incans, Spanish. Spanish army, surrounding dead natives. Do you get a bad feeling about this?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not proud of the writing quality. I still think the idea is fun.


	3. Private Detective (WTNV/Sherlock)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are strangers in town, dear listeners. They are sharply dressed, though their clothing is better suited to somewhere arctic than to our hot, hot desert climate. Before our informant got close enough to make eye contact, one of the men shrank downwards and turned into a hedgehog, his sweater and jeans billowing out around him. His companion, a dramatic figure with a red, sweaty face, gave a shout as of a wounded animal.

There are strangers in town, dear listeners. Carito Petrovna reports that she was out in the sand wastes, collecting tumbleweeds for her garden, when she saw two men approaching on foot. They were sharply dressed, though their clothing, she added, was better suited to somewhere cold — like Svitz! — than to our hot, hot desert climate. Carito approached the strangers to offer them a mistrustful glare, as is the customary greeting of all strangers who pass through our small, quiet little town, but before she got close enough to make eye contact, one of the men shrank downwards and turned into a hedgehog, his sweater and jeans billowing out around him. His companion, a dramatic figure with a red, sweaty face, gave a shout as of a wounded animal. He bent over to retrieve the small, startled erinaceomorph at his feet. Carito Petrovna reports that at this point, she lost sight of the intruders, as the Sheriff’s Secret Police descended from a blue helicopter which had been patrolling the area and surrounded the strangers. She hurried home with her tumbleweeds clutched tight to her chest and called in to the radio station to give us the news. Thanks for the tip, Carito!

And now, a look at the Community Calendar.

Sunday is the annual Night Vale Cactus Growing Contest! Plant your cactus out in the scrublands at midnight, give it a little water, some encouraging words, and a small blood sacrifice, and see who can grow the tallest cactus by sunset! Winners will eat free at Big Riko’s for the next three months, and win a free shack in the shantytown past the Night Vale Elementary School. If you will not be participating, please consider volunteering your time as a judge, as last year’s panel were last seen ascending to the top of the winning cactus to measure its altitude, and we have since lost contact with them. They will be missed. If you are interested in judging, call Diane Creighton of the Night Vale PTA. 

Tuesday will be overcast with a deep, heavy sadness. It is recommended that you stay indoors, and lock away all sharp and potentially dangerous implements well before midnight.

Wednesday will be absolutely ordinary. Plan accordingly.

There are no announcements for Thursday or Friday. This does not mean that there are no events on those days, only that they will creep up on us unawares and overtake us, leaving us stunned and trembling in their wake.

On Saturday, local New Age wellness center Omnipotence will be offering a free meditation class in Mission Grove Park. The class is open to all residents of Night Vale, regardless of experience and/or materiality. Interested citizens should wear loose, dark clothes, congregate at the statue of the shapeshifting demon responsible for venomous spiders, and bring a small stone bowl such as those used for offerings and sacrifices.

Big news for the science world today, as local geologist Dr. Ramón Schwartz announces that he has discovered the first ever known sample of the recently coined vimby. The rock, which is powder blue and completely edible, was found lurking underneath his flowerpot, and chimed softly at him when he lifted the pot to retrieve the spare key he had hidden there. Schwartz has run extensive tests on the sample, and found that not only is it edible, but tastes, quote, “like blueberries … no, actually, it’s more like boysenberries. Wow. That’s incredible!” The sample he presented to the City Council for registration looked less like a rock and more like a hastily constructed blob of papier-mâché painted blue, but Dr. Schwartz demonstrated its remarkable properties by cutting off a corner of the rock with a diamond-bladed knife, and consuming it in front of seven witnesses from the local chapter of the Illuminati.

Congratulations to Dr. Schwartz! Look for his article in the upcoming issue of Scientific American.

Update on the two strangers previously spotted by Carito Petrovna: it appears that the hedgehog was successfully subdued by the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Longtime resident of the shantytown out in the scrublands and the sand wastes, Jenkins McPhee, called in to report that he just saw the other stranger — the one whose suit looks remarkably similar to the one worn by Marcus Vamsten during the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new private library — walk into Big Riko’s to order a slice of pizza. “He sat in a corner by himself and just watched everyone with this look on his face, you know the one,” said Mr. McPhee. I did not know to which look he was referring, as the human face is an endlessly complex prism with which we can only hope to approximate the full range of existential terror we face each day.

Jenkins reports that the man came up to him with twenty dollars in his hand, asking for instructions to the local police station. Upon being asked if he wanted the old police station, or contact information for the Sheriff’s Secret Police, the stranger began to interrogate him about the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Jenkins would not reveal to me what questions he asked, as doing so might implicate him in a thought crime. He would like to stress that he did not answer any of the stranger’s inquiries, but directed him to the sagging, hollowed-out structure next to the elementary school which once housed the police force, before the Schism of ’21.

Well. I think we can all agree on one thing here, dear listeners: this stranger, whoever he is and whatever his purpose may be, can have no good intentions towards our peaceful little town. Why else would he be so insistent on going to the Old Police Station? Why else would he speak of those things which we are not allowed to know? And why else would he solicit information from Jenkins McPhee, who, as everyone knows, suffers from the delusion that he is a middle-aged Irish farmer, even though he is clearly of Zapotec descent and celebrated his fourteenth birthday just last month?

 

 

***

Listeners, I would like to apologize for the unprofessional reporting earlier in this broadcast. To depend only on the word of a few town residents, without sending out any professionally trained reporters to assess the situation, was a gross lapse in judgment on my part. We at the Night Vale Community Radio Station pride ourselves on maintaining a high level of professionalism, and Station Management regrets the error.

In order to correct the mistake, I sent out Intern Luís during the break to track down the stranger and get a quote or two. Let the stranger give us his perspective on things. The expedition was a complete success, and I can say with total confidence and journalistic integrity that the tall, dramatic visitor is a real jerk. Intern Luís found him conferring with Paul Birmingham in Mission Grove Park, openly mocking the bloodstone circle and the dark forces which they either summon or keep at bay (depending on your beliefs about the universe and the nature of the ritual). 

When asked by Intern Luís about his purpose in coming to Night Vale, the stranger replied by looking him up and down, contempt written all over his sweaty red face, and unleashed a torrent of hurtful and shockingly inaccurate descriptions of Luís’s personal history. Luís tells me that these descriptions included ‘malnourished’, ‘clearly suffering from extreme physical abuse in childhood’, and ‘not physically possible, it must be some sort of trick’. He then demanded that Luís tell him what had become of his hedgehog companion. Intern Luís, displaying an unparalleled instinct for self-preservation and teleportation, removed himself from the situation with minimal disruption to his surroundings and homeostatic regulation.

Listeners, I know that I am not alone when I say that such a verbal assault violates all boundaries of common decency, not to mention the dueling guidelines laid down by the City Council in the days of our forefathers. To our uncouth visitor, I say: for shame. For shame.

Residents are advised to avoid direct contact with this stranger, and report all sightings to the Sheriff’s Secret Police by pointing at the stranger and screaming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might finish this one day, but if anyone wants to fill in the gaps, they should definitely do so.


	4. there will be no tenderness (Hannibal)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> «This is good pork» you will say. Hannibal will thank you with a smile touching his eyes, and that is when you will know.
> 
> Written during the tail end of S1; AU from s1e10 or so. I make no apologies for the perspective or the tenses.

Your house will catch fire; a gas leak in the stove, they decide later. All of your dogs make it out alive except for Winston, who will die barking his terror from the bathroom window on the second floor. The firefighters will have to restrain you as you try to go back inside and save him. The house will require extensive rebuilding and you will not return.

You will tell Hannibal about it at your next meeting, voice shaking and gaze darting everywhere but the man in front of you. You will clasp and unclasp your hands, rub your mouth, and hold your head while Hannibal asks you whether you are having any new nightmares. You will answer no. It will be a lie.

«And where are you staying now?»

You will wave a hand and gaze at the richly patterned carpet with blank dark eyes. «There’s a … a motel, about twenty miles from my house. They’re letting the dogs stay as long as I pay to clean the room when I leave» you will say.

«I see» Hannibal will rise from his chair. There will be a grey-bound volume by John Francis Brewer on the bookshelf. Hannibal will pluck it from the shelf like a feather and open it, will run his fingers lovingly over the text as he says, «It would, of course, be unethical of me to offer you temporary accommodations in my home, were I formally employed as your psychiatrist»

You will raise your head to stare at him, bemused.

«However, as a friend, I would be remiss if I did not» Hannibal will look up from the book he has not been reading in order to grant you a thin smile that nearly reaches his eyes.

Your head will begin to ache anew, leaving your vision jittery and blurred. «I couldn’t» you will stammer. «I can’t –»

Hannibal will quiet your concerns, smooth them over with clean, clipped explanations and rationalizations and a final, almost clinical mandate to «think about it».

And after you leave, you will be able to think of little else. You will be roused that night from a restless sleep by shouting through the paper-thin walls of the motel room next to yours; the next night, it will be the banging of the headboard against the wall on the opposite side; but either way, the result will be the same: you will lie awake and allow yourself to entertain fragile, half-formed futures spent in the house of an elegant man with more money at his disposal, currently, than you will make over the course of your entire career. You will probe these futures until your head pounds, until you can no longer remember what your arguments should be.

You will accept Hannibal’s offer.

Despite your efforts to find a new house which will accommodate both yourself and your family of strays, you will not meet with success during the first few weeks. You will continue to live in Hannibal’s guest room and wakes up half an hour earlier than you used to, in order to eat a full breakfast before going to lecture. At first, you will only do so out of deference to your host. «A meal is more than just the consumption of food for energy. It should be an experience, to be enjoyed in and of itself» Hannibal will tell you, and you will nod blearily over coffee.

Later, you will come to find the ritual pleasing for the silent, undemanding companionship that it offers.

Nightmare visions will continue to wake you from sleep more often than not. You will open your eyes wide and lie on your back, breathing loud in the not-quite-black of the guest room. You will not be surprised when a figure unfolds itself from the chair at your desk, crosses the room, and replaces the sheet you will have thrown off in the middle of the night.

«Shh…» Hannibal will say. He will lean in too close for too long and this _will be_ a surprise to you. You will tilt your face up to form a question that is only partially coherent, and Hannibal will withdraw before you have a chance to speak.

You will not speak of it the next morning either, over eggs and coffee and sausage. You will greet each other silently, and then Hannibal will leave you to clear their plates while he meditates and prepares for the day’s clients.

During the time in which you will stay with Hannibal, you will eat many, many of his dishes. You will return to the house ready to tear down the walls in a fit of rage, if only to feel something human after spending all day in the mind of a sociopath; and you will find a plate of lamb’s ribs and spicy sausage sitting on a bed of kale, waiting for you. These occasions will ameliorate the stress and confusion of static in your head, feelings which will only proliferate when you find the carefully displayed cadaver of a young gymnast in the woods. Her arms will be pinned to the outstretched branches of a pine tree. Her head will be mounted above them. Her hips and legs will straddle the branch below them, leaving a gap for a conspicuously missing torso. Her blood will mix with the sap running down the trunk of the tree, and your own blood will sing with pride in the work that you will imagine yourself doing.

One day, you will come home to simple lasagna, and you will eat it while Hannibal lectures you about Tuscany wines and your dogs quibble over morsels at your feet, and you will struggle to focus on the different varieties of grapes instead of the darkness you will feel creeping in at the edges of your vision. You will not acknowledge that this is what you have come to consider home.

You will consult on another murder, and you will have dreams about dismembering your own body, laying out your organs in neat and artfully arranged rows, and you will no longer consider these to be nightmares.

You will invite Alana over for dinner, and Hannibal will ask you to pour the wine. Alana will smile at you and you how you are doing. When you mutter a vague answer, she will ask Hannibal, and Hannibal will make a sly remark about doctor-patient confidentiality which Alana will return with a comment about doctor-patient boundaries which you will interrupt with a bemused reminder that you are right there before them.

The entrée that night will be loin. Loin of what, exactly, will not be specified. The absence will be a pause in the flow of conversation which will permeate through the layers of your subconscious so slowly that you will not notice until there are only two bites left on your plate.

Abigail will arrive two weeks later while you are sleepwalking, dreaming of standing still while the forest streams past on either side. She will naturally be startled by your presence, rousing the ire of the dogs who will guard you on your nocturnal travels. They will in turn alert Hannibal, who will come down the hall with a long knife held easily in his hand. He will set it down when he sees the scene before him. He will guide you, still-stumbling, to the wall, pressing you back against it for support. You will begin to resist, and you will realize who it is and you will let the weight and the heat of his hands sink into you.

«I’m so sorry» Abigail will say.

You will not understand. «What? For what?»

«There is nothing to apologize for» Hannibal will say. «I have told you: you are always welcome in my home»

He will offer her the guest bedroom in which you will have been sleeping. It has a chair in which he will sit and make sure that she stays. Explanations will wait until the morning. He will glance at you to gauge your reaction, which will be to ask if there is a couch on which you can sleep.

«There is a sofa in the library» Hannibal will say.

«Thanks» You will find yourself hesitating in the doorway, unwilling to leave Abigail. She will be shivering, more from fear than from cold.

«I couldn’t stand it» Abigail says. «The way they look at me. First my scarf, and then my hands. I’m a murderer, what should I have expected to happen?»

Hannibal will murmur to her in a comforting whisper, and you will follow both of them into the guest bedroom. Abigail will fall asleep surrounded by five dogs, fingers clenched around the blankets and knees drawn tight against her chest. You will sit with Hannibal at the foot of the bed in silence, your head drifting onto his shoulder. In the morning, your memories of the previous night will be hazy, but you will wake up on top of the blankets, curled among your dogs, and Abigail will come in to serve you breakfast with a tentative smile on her face.

Alana will arrive the next day in a tight-curled ball of fury, and Abigail will refuse to leave. She will plant herself on the slate-gray sofa in the parlor and hug a cushion to her chest. Alana will order you and Hannibal out of the room; as you shut the door behind you, Alana will kneel down beside the sofa and speaks to Abigail in the low, soothing tones with which you have coaxed strays from the side of the road. Hannibal will vanish down the hall, leaving you to lean against the wall and ignore the piteous catlike wailing which you will hear coming from the other end of the house. You will know better than to trust your senses, by then.

Hannibal will break the illusion by returning with a tray of tea balanced on one hand. «For the wait» he will explain, spinning one around and offering it to you handle-first. You will accept it with a swallow and a nod.

You will not speak until the door opens again. Alana will slip out of the room and hold the door closed behind her. «This is a terrible idea» she will say in a low voice.

Hannibal will nod, face blank. You will search him for any emotions betrayed by a twitch of the eye or a muscle in the cheek, but you will find non, and it will be a curious relief. You will only find it a relief until Hannibal glances over at you, thoughtful and measured as always, and your eyes will skitter away to the curve of Alana’s throat.

«If you think it would be wise to remove her and return her to the hospital, I of course defer to your judgment» Hannibal will say.

Alana will press her lips together and look between the two of you. «You’re not her father» she will, and it will not be clear to which of you she is speaking.

~~*~~*~~

[break]

~~*~~*~~

Three months after your house burns, you will answer the door while Hannibal and Abigail are in the kitchen, and Alana will be on the doorstep. She will grip her purse like she means to do battle, though she will smile when she sees you.

«You’re looking dressed up this week» she will comment.

Your mouth will twitch. You will take her coat and offer her your arm in an exaggerated gesture of courtesy. «I showered» you will joke, though that will not be all. The shirt will belong to Hannibal, after a polite but pointed comment about your rumpled clothing, and the shirt will be just slightly too tight across the shoulders.

She will nod as she eyes the seams. «That must be it»

~~*~~*~~

[break]

~~*~~*~~

«This is good pork» you will say. Hannibal will thank you with a smile touching his eyes, and that is when you will know.

And then you will do nothing, will take no action with this information that is not information, is more implicit than explicit, never confirmed … You will not be able to explain why, and you will be confused, sometimes, as to what it is that you know, or think that you know. Sometimes you will not believe that the exchange took place outside of the confines of your own head, because the solution to the problem is too simple, too neat: the Ripper is someone you know, someone you trust, a betrayal of the unarticulated friendship that has arisen between the two of you. At dinner, you will hesitate only a moment before thinking about evenings spent drinking wine by the fire and strange, thoughtful conversations with the man who welcomed you into his home. You will eat —

The dark circles under your eyes will become more pronounced. Without any pauses in between, you will go from lecture hall to FBI offices to crime scenes to the place in your head which is golden and sharply defined and growing closer every time you close your eyes and turn back the clock. «This is my design» you will murmur, and Hannibal’s wry half-smile will appear on your lips.

After a certain amount of time and a certain number of cases, even Jack will begin to notice that something is amiss. In the case of Jack Crawford, it will only be because by that time, you will be less reluctant than you have been in the past to look. You will devour the scene before you while your hands twitch at your side.

«You all right?» Jack will ask, peering at you with a heavy frown on his face.

~~*~~*~~

[break]

~~*~~*~~

You will blink and then you will be very close, close enough to smell the faint hint of cologne that he wears. The echoes of a question you do not remember asking will ring in your head.

«Yes, of course» Hannibal will cradle your head between his hands and press a kiss to your forehead, breathing in deeply. You will close your eyes and exhale. You will want to fall forwards, to lean against someone who is solid and real. You will not let yourself; you need to reassure yourself that you are not that far gone.

~~*~~*~~

[break]

~~*~~*~~

«You wouldn't lie to me, would you?»

«Do you have something you want to know?» He will gaze at you intently, and you will understand that he is giving you a way out, a respite.

«No» you will say, shaking your head.

«Then no» he will say. «There is no reason for me to lie.»


	5. Mirrors (Supernatural)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dean never gets a chance to say yes to Michael, because the Powers That Be have plans for him that include crossing realities and learning things about his own world that he couldn't have imagined. And back home, Sam has to set aside his feelings of animosity in order to get along with Deanna Winchester, who seems to loathe him even more than his own brother, if that was possible right now.
> 
> (Rule 63/canon crossover, which takes place right before the end of S5.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first few sections of a 50K AU Big Bang that I never completed in time for the challenge. It was an unnecessarily convoluted plot on top of an already convoluted canon-plot, but I do like the first part.

During the last days, it is written in the commonly accepted text of the Book of Revelation that the archangel Michael will defeat the Dragon that is Satan, casting him and his angels out of heaven forevermore. This will be done amidst many signs and wonders which herald the end of the world.

The Book of Revelation is, of course, incomplete. It left out the little people, the foot soldiers and the lieutenants and the children of Adam who were swept up into the conflict whether they liked it or not.

And me. Not a single mention of me, by the way. They wonder why middle children grow up to have complexes.

— Gabriel 

 

**CHESS**

In a penthouse apartment that shouldn’t exist, which comes with the best-stocked liquor bar in the world, one archangel sits down with a bottle of thousand year old wine and has a drink with themselves.

“That is the right plural, right? I’m documenting this for posterity.”

“We are a being of many talents.”

The two speakers are thus: the first, a middle-aged woman with black hair, golden brown skin, and curves just this side of chubby, wrapped in an embroidered dressing gown. The second, a considerably paler man with a wedge shaped face and a cheap looking three-piece suit . Disconcertingly, they share the same features.

“I’m starting to think that writing isn’t one of them,” says the woman. Her name is Gabriel. She sweeps the notebook in front of her off the table with one grand gesture; it vanishes before it can hit the floor. “Load of shit. Documenting angst I overrated.”

“I still made a tape for my boys, when the time comes,” says her companion. His name is also Gabriel, though his pronunciation is a bit flatter and broader than hers. Otherwise things might get confusing.

She looks contemplative at her glass of wine. “You make it sound like you’ve got a harem. Should I be envious of myself?”

Her counterpart spits out his wine. “Oh dear god no. Can you imagine? One would try to gut me if I got within three feet of him, and the other’s so far into Narnia he’s probably fucking a Calorman as we speak.”

His counterpart shoots him a deeply skeptical look. “You put way too much thought into that.”

Gabriel shrugs. He scarfs down a quarter of the tiramisu which appears before him. “got to drown out the crippling depression somehow.”

“About that.” Gabriel leans forwards, striking a pose reminiscent of Paris Hilton imitating Audrey Hepburn’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

“Did the Xanax help?”

She ignores the jib. “What about a trade?” She conjures into being a chess board, little figurines lined up in an army of Good versus Evil. Lucifer and Michael stand as the kings; Sam and Dean as their respective queens; Gabriel is, he notes with indignation, the bishop next to Castiel’s knight. Before he can argue with this designation, she brings about a second board, this time with the players of her own world set into place.

“My eyes on the ground tell me that Deanna Winchester is on her way to [town where Lisa lives] right now, for a tearful farewell to one of her conquests before she goes to join dear Michael in the Biblical sense,” says she.

He shudders. “Old Testament sense, or New Testament sense? There’s a big difference.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I don’t want to have to choose sides just yet. I haven’t made up my mind.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth.”

“What we need is something to kill time. Be the spanner, be the leaf.” She reaches around the chess pieces to pluck Sam off of both boards. “These ones are a pain in the ass, but also stubborn as asses when they want to be.”

He takes his Sam from her, rolling the figurine between thumb and index finger. “Grumpy bastard. What about this one?” He puts the Sam queens back down on the black squares, and picks up the Dean and Deanna queens instead. “I have to admit, seeing the kid dead lost a lot of its appeal after the three hundredth time it happened.”

She replaces the figurines: Deanna opposite Sam, and Dean opposite Samantha on her own board. Then she refills her wine glass. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s good to have someone who gets me the way that you do,” he says, smile bright and artificial as he raises his glass.

She follows suit. “To shitty families and siblings too proud to give in.”

They clink glasses, and drink.

 

**Dean (Farewells)**

_Sunday, 3:32pm_

The house where Lisa and Ben live looks a little different than Dean remembers it. When he gets out of the car, he can see flowers growing along the front of the house, struggling up through the gravel where he remembers only the discarded attempts at a garden that never survived. The fact that there are flowers now, in _gravel_ , is probably a metaphor that Chuck’s thrown in to make himself feel more like an actual author, and not just some holy conduit, Dean thinks with unnecessary savageness. The flower that perseveres in breaking through the rocky soil, isn’t that how it goes? Little Engine that Could? Problem is, he can’t see how ‘keep on chugging’ is really going to help him out here. Seems like keeping on keeping on is what’s gotten them into this shitshow in the first place. Then again, Chuck’s not exactly a first-class author, so maybe his metaphor just sucks. For all he knows, the flower could be a warning sign — isn’t that a thing, secret flower language? Rhonda (black hair, red highlights, Toronto) had thrown a fit when he gave her lilies, ‘cause they predicted death or something.

Or maybe he’s just stressed to hell and back, and overthinking a freaking flower. It’s not like Chuck’s target audience cares about metaphors, or would if the stupid books were still being published. It’s more likely that he’s just obsessing over the flower because it’s easier than thinking about what he’s here to do.

Yeah, probably that last option.

He knocks on the door of the house and waits, heart pounding. A moment later, the door opens, and Lisa leans against the doorframe, looking up at him. Her hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail, her sleeves are rolled up, and she smells like Windex. It makes her beautiful in a way that his self-image demands he find less attractive than a skimpy dress and makeup, but at the end of the day he can’t find it in himself to care. He folds his arms to keep himself from moving forward and sweeping her up — if he does, he’ll probably never leave — and holds himself at a distance, smiling. ‘Hi. I, uh, I needed to talk to you, and I don’t have your number, so I …’ He trails off.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, after a beat. ‘Do I know you?’

His heart freezes in his chest. ‘It’s me. Dean?’

‘Who?’ She tilts her head, a small frown forming on her face. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got an awful memory for faces; where do I know you from?’

He stares at her, wondering for a moment if he’s lost his mind. It occurs to him that maybe she was one of his hallucinations — from the djinn, from the succubus, from Zachariah, or Gabriel or Alistair hell (and Christ, he’s had his head fucked with enough for a few more lifetimes) — but he dismisses the idea. He can recall dozens of memories from the time that they have spent together, clearer and more vivid than any hallucinations could produce. ‘We, uh. We were together, for a while, about twelve years ago,’ he says, more confidently.

Lisa shakes her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. I would have remembered you, for sure,’ she says, eyeing him up and down.

Somehow, that makes it even worse. He looks into her eyes, searching, and finds no recognition there, only wary curiosity. He might as well be a stranger. He tries to say something, anything, and discovers a lump in his throat that threatens to turn into full-on tears if he forces it. It takes a couple of tries to get his voice working again. ‘Nothing. Never mind, I must have … I must have got the wrong house.’

She leans out of the door a little. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No, no it’s nothing. I’ll just get going.’ Dean stares at her, willing himself to burn her face into his memory. This isn’t the last impression of her that he wanted, but if it’s this or nothing, he’ll take what he can get. He needs something to bring with him into the corner of his head into which he will be crushed when Michael takes over. If it has to be unpleasant, then so be it. At least she’s in it. ‘Goodbye,’ he says.

He turns away deliberately, ignoring her when she says, ‘Wait, who are you looking for? Maybe I can help.’ He’s wasted enough time. Only with his back to her does he let himself scrub at his eyes with the back of his wrist, and he stops that when he gets to the Impala.

The seat is too far forwards. He scowls at his knees where they’re jammed up under the steering wheel, like it’s their fault he suddenly doesn’t fit in his own car. When did that happen? Maybe he’d accidentally kicked something while he was getting out before, he thinks, and then shakes himself. What does it matter? Hell, maybe aliens dropped out of the sky and decided to adjust all of his mirrors, too; it’s not going to make a difference to him in an hour or two. He adjusts seat and mirrors, flinches away from his reflection, and starts to drive.

 

 

**Castiel (Sense)**

Sam paces around the table. She looks ready to tear her hair out, and Castiel doesn’t need the full extent of her power to feel her distress from across the room. She runs through her list of options: What To Do When A Winchester (Or Bobby) Is In Distress. Beer? No — Sam doesn’t drink with the same compulsive urgency as her sister when she’s upset. A hug? Sam no longer has the same instinctive aversion to touching her that she did when they first became friends, but Castiel does not think that it would be accepted, regardless. She wishes that Sam would speak, rant aloud or give her a better indication of what she’s thinking. Instead, she paces around the motel room, silent, occasionally throwing her hands down and staring up at the ceiling.

“She hasn’t said yes yet,” says Castiel. “I would feel my sister’s presence.”

“Thanks, Cas, I’d never have guessed,” Sam snaps, then, “Sorry.”

Castiel doesn’t have the energy to answer her. She scrapes the reaches of her mind, searching for any sign of Deanna’s presence, even though she knows better than anyone else that she is hidden from angelic sight.

Sam whirls around on her heel and picks up the knife on the bed. Castiel eyes her warily, hoping that she won’t need to take steps to restrain her only remaining friend.

“Come on. I know where she’ll be,” says Sam. “We can take Paul’s car. He won’t need it anymore.” She sheathes the knife sideways in the back of her belt, and grabs a handful of Castiel’s sleeve to tug her along, like she needs to take some sort of physical action and Castiel is the closest available target. “I know it’d be playing into our ‘destiny’, but I’m still going to kill her when we find her.”

“I’m not sure that would be wise,” Castiel says, as she is forcibly removed from the room. She allows herself to be dragged along, back towards the bar in Blue Earth. Sam’s face is dark. They are met by a few townspeople at the bar with grim faces and liquor aplenty, and Castiel doesn’t know whether to pity or envy them. Sam charges past them, brushing off the lone woman who tries to speak to her.

Castiel watches Sam jump-start the car with the care of a student; at the rate she’s going, she’ll run out of angelic power sooner rather than later, and there will come a time when she will need to rely on human forms of transportation like her friends. She thinks that she understands the basic process, but as she leans forwards to watch Sam tug on a wire, awareness sweeps across her consciousness. It is dark and cracked, like ice crawling through a rock, and it comes from the southeast. Castiel has never felt anything like it before in her six millennia of life, but she knows one thing: it shouldn’t be here. The force of the _wrongness_ is so strong that she freezes, unaware for the moment of her vessel of flesh, to let the information of the universe seep into her consciousness.

In its wake, a blast of recognition follows. Castiel is just about ready to tell Sam with precision where the rupture in the natural order of the universe occurred, but then she feels it: a presence that is, overwhelmingly, Deanna. Deanna at the heart of the crack in the universe. Castiel forgets herself entirely.

“Cas!”

There are hands on arms, shaking the body. Castiel blinks. The body is hers, and the hands belong to Sam. She regains control of herself, and stands up straight. One of Sam’s hands flies to Castiel’s face, turning her head this way and that. Castiel watches her, until Sam is satisfied with what she finds there.

“What just happened?” Sam asks.

“Something is wrong,” says Castiel. “I can feel Deanna again.”

 

 

**Deanna (Stranger)**

_Sunday, 3:37pm_

Deanna stares at the door for what feels like an eternity after Lisa shuts it and tries not to throw up. This is probably the part where she should cry, but crying has never been her thing, and her body isn’t going to change the habits of a lifetime just because it’d be more convenient to cry than puke. Once she’s sure that she isn’t going to vomit her last meal all over her shoes, she turns around and gets back in the car. She drives back to the motel in silence, pops the cassette out of the deck and tosses it into the back seat. No amount of grandstanding power metal is going to make this shitshow any easier without anyone to grandstand for; and she’s made sure that there is no one.

When she gets back, she figures that she may as well start packing her things. She gets a cardboard box from behind the motel’s dumpster and returns to her room to do the deed.

That’s when she notices that this isn’t her room.

Oh, it’s the one she was given all right. The key fits in the lock, and the bed is as she left it. But the scant possessions aren’t hers. The jacket slung over the chair belongs to a man, as do the clothes in her bag. She scours the room, but there isn’t anyone else here, visible or invisible. Not that that means anything; fucking angels. No, wait — ribs, right? There’s no way they’re finding her, it can’t be angels, and if it was, she’d bet her life they’d do more than mess with her things. Well, Gabriel might, if she could be bothered to show up. But again — why? Gabriel had better things to do with her time than screw around with Deanna. (Like screwing around with Sam, for example.)

She has just completed her inspection of the room when the door crashes open. In the mirror over the dresser, she sees a tall figure with dirty blonde hair and a plaid shirt, and her heart leaps into her throat for a moment — _Sam, it’s Sam, she’s found me, and she’s not going to understand what has to be done_ — but it’s a man and her sister is nowhere to be found, of course, the way that she wanted, so she spins around without fear, holding her gun ready. “Stop right there,” she commands him. “Who the hell are you?”

The man in the doorway puts his hands up. There is a knife in one of them. “Who are you?” he asks.

”I don’t think that’s any of your business,” she says, studying him. He doesn’t look like a demon; he’s not self-possessed enough, so to speak. She can see why she’d thought he was Sam out of the corner of her eye: his hair and clothing are basically the same, and the shape of his face is similar. It’s … eerie.

”No, I think it is. Where’s Dean?” he asks.

”Who?”

”Oh, don’t play dumb.” He starts to drop his hands, sneering; she flicks the muzzle of her gun at him until he lifts his arms again. “What are you? A demon?”

”I’m the Sword of Michael,” says Deanna, and feels a slow grin creep across her face. If she’s going to take out a whole lot of innocent people in a blaze of destruction sooner rather than later, then she’s going to milk the power that gives her for every drop it’s got while she’s still in control of her own body. “So get away from me. Unless you want to be incinerated by a pissed-off archangel for killing its vessel.”

The look that the man gives her isn’t the cowed, fearful expression she’d been hoping for; he looks more confused than anything else. “You’re the what? Wait … okay, listen to me.”

”Why?” She circles around him, closer.

‘Who told you that you’re the Sword of Michael?’ he asks. ‘Please. You can trust me. I want to help; I’m on your side.’

‘Sure you are.’ Deanna’s never had an enemy try to convince her of that before.

The man’s face goes through a series of contortions that look bizarrely misplaced on him. ‘I am, I swear.’ He opens his jacket and pulls out two weapons to set down on the desk: the silver sword of an angel, the kind that Anna used to kill Uriel, and the twin of Reuben’s demon-killing knife. ‘Look, see? I’m not going to hurt you. Just tell me what’s going on.’

Deanna starts forwards. ‘Where did you get that?’ She gestures at the knife. ‘That is not yours.’

‘It … was given to me.’

‘By who?’ Deanna tries to picture a situation in which Sam would willingly part with the knife to someone she had never met before. All signs would point to her doing something incredibly stupid, which is never allowed. Deanna is the only one who gets to do the incredibly stupid things.

‘Does it matter? I can’t use it on you; you’d shoot me before I ever got close to you.’ He sounds pleading. Deanna almost cares.

‘That knife belongs to my sister. You have no right to it,’ she says through clenched teeth.

“ _Christo._ ,” he says.

Deanna blinks, but doesn’t flinch. Something isn’t right here, beyond the fact that something about this guy rubs her the wrong way. It’s her missing possessions, and Lisa not knowing who she was, and the way he looks at her like _she’s_ the intruder. She lowers the gun a few inches. ‘One: do I look like a demon? And two: who the hell is Ruby?’

‘Ruby was the demon who gave me the knife. I killed her,’ he adds a moment later, voice hard, and oh. She knows that tone, and she knows why this is so strange.

‘My sister got her knife from a demon named Reuben,’ she says slowly.

They stare at each other. A muscle in his jaw twitches. ‘Who are you?’ he asks.

She takes a deep breath, and makes sure that she’s ready to defend herself if she’s wrong. Because if she is, she could find herself facing suddenly summoned legions of angels or demons. ‘Deanna Winchester,’ she says.

Now the look on his face is priceless. His mouth actually falls open with shock. He takes a step forwards and holds out his hand. ‘Sam. Uh, Winchester.’

‘And you have a brother.’ She shakes his hand and looks up at him. If it had been weird when Sam hit suddenly shot up three inches during college, then it was stranger still to have to tilt her head up even farther to meet this man’s eyes. And that was why he’d looked so odd; he made the same faces as her sister.

‘Yeah. Do you …’

‘Sam. Samantha. We were named after our dad’s parents.’

Sam — this Sam — frowns. ‘Your dad’s?’

‘Dean and Samantha. Our dad was Mark.’

‘Mary,’ says Sam, reverently. ‘Our mom’s name was Mary.’

‘Did she …’ Deanna doesn’t need to finish the sentence before Sam nods.

‘Azazel.’

‘And your dad?’

‘John. He made a deal to bring Dean back.’

‘Joan. After our dad died, she raised us to be hunters. She … did the same thing. After the car accident.’

Sam nods along with her, expression pained. It is so like her sister, and Deanna sits on the edge of the bed, shaking her head in the hopes that the dissonance he creates will go away.

‘What the hell is going on?’ she asks, then, ‘And how did you find me — I mean, Dean?’

She feels the bed dip as he sits down next to her and grips the edge of the mattress. ”I couldn’t miss the signs, and it wasn’t hard to figure out which places he’d go on the farewell tour.”

Deanna crosses her legs and hugs herself, glaring at the dresser across the room. “Lisa didn’t know who I was,” she says. It’s easier to admit it to a stranger with Sam’s name than it will probably ever be to admit it to Sam herself, and she takes advantage of that fact.

”You’re here for Lisa, too?” asks Sam. He looks startled.

”You know her?”

”I met her a couple of years ago. She was Dean’s … I don’t know. She mattered to him.”

Deanna shuts her eyes. Yeah, that’s about as adequate a description as she’s going to get. “Yep,” she says, when the lump in her throat is under control and she can open her eyes again.

”So what are we dealing with?” Sam asks, after a long pause. “And where’s Dean? I need to find him before he does something stupid.”

She pulls herself together. ‘It could be Zachariah dicking around with our memories again, except that he’s not supposed to be able to find us. Or it could be a hell of a coincidence.’

Sam raises his eyebrows. ‘Maybe it’s both. I mean, what if he did find us, and this is some sort of alternate reality?’

‘You mean like what Gabriel keeps doing?’ Deanna twists around to face him. ‘Has done to us.’

‘Mystery Spot?’ he asks, wincing.

‘That’s what Sam says — my Sam. And TV Land, whatever the fuck that was about.’

Sam sucks in a breath. ‘Yep, done those too.’

Deanna considers this. ‘So one of us isn’t real then.’

‘Not necessarily,’ says Sam.

‘God, I hope not, considering that I’d probably be the one who isn’t real.’ Deanna grins mirthlessly, tilting her head back to stare at the speckled ceiling.

When she next looks across the room, there’s a disheveled accountant standing a few feet in front of her. “What is taking so long?” he asks Sam, and then he looks at Deanna. His eyes go wide. “You’re not Dean. You are Dean, but this one, not the one who’s supposed to be here.” He steps closer and peers into Deanna’s face. She looks down, away from his eyes. “Where’s Dean?”

Sam rises and puts a hand on his shoulder, keeping him at arm’s length from the both of them. “We, uh, don’t know. Cas, this is Other Dean. Other Dean … Castiel.”

“Deanna,” she corrects him.

“Sorry,” says Sam.

Castiel continues to examine her. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Deanna stands and spreads shaking hands. “No shit, Sherlock.”

“My name is Castiel,” he says, and frowns. “Do I not exist, on your plane?”

She glances at the man who calls himself Sam, hoping for some sort of cue that isn’t forthcoming. “You’re not — like you said. You’re Cas, but not mine.” She winces at the unconscious emphasis she put on the last word; though she can’t tell if the man and the angel picked up on it. There’s definitely an awkward silence brewing, so she rushes on before anyone else notices it. “Hey, Castiel. How does this work? If I’m here, does that mean there’s some dude named Dean about to start the apocalypse in my backyard?”

 

**Dean (Handcuffs and Things That Go Bump In The Night)**

_Sunday, 4:15pm_

Dean wakes up chained to a bed. Not in a fun way, either; he recognizes the grubby striped mattress and iron walls of Bobby’s panic room, though he’s changed a few things up since last time Dean was in here: added a couple of small, sigil-patterned tapestries to the walls, for some reason. If this is going anywhere sexy, something is seriously wrong, and he’s screwed. He sits up and starts rattling at the chain, testing its limits.

Which is, of course, when a dark-haired woman with a grim set to her jaw steps inside.

“You’re awake,” she says. “Good.”

“Who the hell are you?” he asks.

There is movement behind her; Dean leans over as far as the handcuffs will allow to see who it is. He thinks it’s Sam for a moment, but then they step up next to the woman, and he sees, dimly, the same person who had strolled into his hotel room and yelled at him while he was trying to figure out why some woman had filled his bag with her clothes. She folds her arms and stares at him with murderous intent. Dean stares right back.

‘This might be difficult to understand,’ says the first woman, the pretty one. He switches his attention to her.

“Try me,” he snarls.

“My name is Castiel,” the pretty woman says.

“You are not Cas,” he growls.

‘Yes, she is. Believe me,’ says the woman behind her, the one who looks like she’s never heard of lipstick or razor blades.

Dean tries to go for a carelessly arrogant tone. ‘And you are?’

She almost rolls her eyes, he can see it. “Sam Winchester.”

Psychological warfare, then. Really fucked-up, bizarre warfare — even the demons had known to go for the right fucking gender when they impersonated his family — that shouldn’t work and still disorients him like a kick to the chest. He may have one hand chained and out of action, but that doesn’t mean he’s defenseless, and he braces himself. “Okay. You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me who the hell you are and what you want from me before I bite through my tongue and drown myself,” he says, glaring at his captors. His pulse is racing, adrenaline flooding his system. He’s ready.

“Don’t,” says the pretty one, the one who wears Castiel’s name. “I can explain.”

Dean clenches his hands into fists. He’s been fed that line before.

&

_3 hours later_

[They don’t do much, they just sit around the table and wait for an attack to come, because this is either a force of the angels, or of nameless creatures from before the creation of Purgatory, so there’s clearly higher forces at work. Because of this, everyone is tense for the rest of the day, waiting for something to happen. They set wards before going to sleep, and Sam stays up for most of the night, anyway.]

“You really think this is necessary?” Dean fiddles with the handcuff on his wrist, which in turn jangles Sam’s arm and interrupts her typing.

She glares at him. “Yes.”

Dean sits back in his chair and sighs. It had taken him long enough to convince the two women to let him out of the panic room, convince them that he wasn’t immediately going to run away; (“Seriously, ladies, I don’t know jack shit about what’s going on, either. As long as we don’t injure each other, we’ll be fine.”) he supposes that it’s too much to ask for that he be allowed to move around freely.

“You know,” he says, “If some all-powerful being comes looking for us like this, we’re screwed.”

“What, like the all-powerful being you were about to call down on all our asses?” Sam shoots back.

“We don’t know what brought you here,” Castiel interrupts. Her tone — flat, unaffected by such petty concerns as humor (or so she’d like you to believe) — is exactly the same as Cas’, and it’s more than a little weird. “I have never heard of this happening before. It’s best to keep you close.”

Dean is pretty sure that’s not right, either, but then Barbara comes rolling in from the hallway, a stack of books in her lap, and he forgets what he was going to say. Barbara … from what Sam and Castiel have told him, she’s an alternate version of the person he knows as Bobby, but it still feels like the stairs rotting out underneath him whenever he hears wheels on floorboards and sees a stocky, gray-haired woman in plaid instead of Bobby. She doesn’t seem to notice, and if she does, she doesn’t say anything. She stops at the table next to him and deposits the stack of books, sending papers flying in their wake.

“There you go. Fyodorov’s personal journals and theories of cosmology. Never thought I’d have a use for them. Got these off a preacher back in the eighties. Bastard was just gonna chuck ‘em if I didn’t pay him for it. Figured it was a waste of money, but what do you know.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad you did,” says Dean offhandedly. Barbara flips open the first page of the book and trails short, thick fingers down the table of contents. “Not that this isn’t a barrel of laughs, but I’ve got an apocalypse back home to take care of, and this is a little too Twilight Zone-ish for me. Heh.”

All three women exchange glances, silently conferring about something that Dean has somehow missed. He pulls himself in a little closer, taking up a little less space, and they continue their watch. They are none of them sure what is going to happen next — or whether the forces which tore Deanna out of this world and brought Dean to it in her place are going to come back to bear down on them for something else having happened than what was according to their plans.

According to Castiel, there are only two forces on earth which could have brought Dean from another universe. One of them is the angels. “I cannot know their exact reasons, nor the reason for their timing. I can, however, say this: if it is my brothers and sisters, then there is a reason that they chose you, specifically, to take Deanna’s place. And if it is the Other …” Here, she trails off ominously.

“The other what?” asks Sam.

Castiel shakes her head. “The only other creature I know of who has the power to influence the structure of the universe in this manner is Leviathan, and it was locked away long ago. I would have heard the murmuring of my siblings if the gates to Purgatory had been opened.”

“What are you going to do when you get back?” asks Sam. She leans on her elbow and regards him.

Dean meets her gaze and shrugs off the shudder of unease that runs through him. She _looks_ too much like his Sam. Her face is softer, less angular, and she’s at least four inches shorter, but the hair, and the jacket, he swears are exactly the same. From time to time, the light even glances off of the same shiny stretch of scars on the back of her hand. It throws him off. “What?” he asks, with what he hopes is a pleasant smile. She repeats the question. A weight settles in his chest — everyone who’s ever complained about butterflies in their stomach is obviously lying, because it’s the knot in his chest behind his sternum, anticipation of meat hooks ripping open his ribs and laying his lungs bare, that Dean experiences. Through his frustration with his surroundings, the circumstances under which he got here come through, and despair settles on him, smothering once more. “What do you think?” he says.

Dean can feel Barbara’s eyes boring into his back, which he ignores. She is _not_ Bobby, and he does not answer to her. Sam flinches. “I can’t let you do that,” she says.

Dean tries to stare her down. It doesn’t work. “How are you planning on stopping me?” he says.

She turns back to her laptop, scowling. No one says anything for a while, as they all search for anything that could explain what had happened to land Dean in Bizarro-world and jump at small noises that sound like feathers. Dean is ready to move on from it, and focus on the task at hand, when Samantha speaks again. “You were at the same motel, in the same room, saying goodbye to the same person as Deanna was,” she says.

Dean looks up from a treatise on Medieval UFOs, because apparently people have nothing better to do with their time than write about freaking aliens. “That’s right.”

“And you made the same choice, as she did. You killed the Whore of Babylon.”

He purses his lips. “Yes I did.”

“So … if you go back and say yes, then that’s what will happen to Deanna. Parallel dimensions, right, Cas?”

Castiel’s voice is, as ever, impassive. “Not necessarily. In a world without interference, it is probable. However … whatever or whoever has brought Dean to this world has changed the influence that the connection between the worlds has.” She nods at Dean. “Free will.”

”You’re saying that, if whoever had just left well enough alone, then me and this other version of me would have kept on doing the same things, but … since we know about each other now, there’s a better chance that only one of us will screw things up. Or that we’ll screw things up differently.”

”That is bullshit,” says Barbara.

”Ineffable,” Castiel corrects her.

“No, that makes sense,” says Sam.

Dean stares at her. “How does that make sense?”

Sam tucks her hair behind her ear, ignoring when it immediately falls loose again. “It’s like me and Mom.”

”Wait — your mom is my dad, right?” asks Dean. “God, that sounds weird.”Considering the amount of weird, random crap that happens to him on a daily basis, the things that genuinely freak him out are few and far between, but this might just take the cake. That’s not taking frightening things into consideration.

Sam snorts. ‘If you want to put it like that. But, okay, I grew up with my mom, and we were so similar that I ended up running away and doing everything I could to not be her.’ Barbara makes a small noise under her breath that Sam ignores. ‘But if I hadn’t grown up with her, I’d probably be just like her. And after she died, when I stopped thinking about her all the time, I ended up making all of her mistakes anyway.’

Dean nods. ‘Yes, you did.’

‘Right, thanks. My point is — you didn’t know that there was another you. Now that you do, you won’t be practically the same person anymore.’ Sam finishes, looking proud of herself. ‘Which is why you can’t say yes to Michael.’

There is silence. ‘The metaphor is imperfect,’ says Castiel. ‘But close enough.’

‘And … what does that have to do with me saying yes? I won’t be here.’

‘It doesn’t,’ Barbara breaks in. ‘Don’t mean it ain’t a stupid idea. I’m not going to let any version of your sorry ass bring down hell on any version of mine.’

Dean has to give her that. ‘Okay, fair point,’ he says. ‘But if it’s all the same to you, I’d still like to go back to Kansas. I’ve already got my own ex-junkie to rag on me there.’

‘I get it; you’re angry,’ Sam says, voice infuriatingly calm. ‘Just … let’s focus, okay?’

‘Hey, I wasn’t saying anything,’ he says.

‘Girls,’ Barbara warns them, then, ‘Sorry. _Children_. I swear, you two can’t stop sniping at each other even when one of you is from a different goddamn plane.’

Dean hunches his shoulders. “I am not related to you; you don’t get to say that.”

“It’s my house — hell, my universe — you don’t get to talk to me like that,” Barbara counters.

Things might have gotten tense at this point — Dean is ready to fume — but then, somewhere outside the house, there is a noise like a heavy object falling out of the sky. Dean tenses; and in order to maintain his own balance, he moves his chained hand and grips Samantha by the wrist. She glances down at their hands, up at him, eyes flickering into understanding — it’s to make it easier to fight, not a gesture of affection — and then she reaches behind her and with her free hand brings out Ruby’s knife. Castiel slips out her own blade from seemingly nowhere. Barbara simply freezes.

They wait. Even with his hand covering the jingling part of their handcuffs, Dean doesn’t dare move for fear of making noise.

Castiel walks silently over to the window, pressing herself against the wall beside it, and looks out. “I see nothing,” she informs Barbara. “I will go outside and make sure.”

Dean, Samantha, and Barbara all look at each other, putting aside hostilities in favor of shared trepidation.

“Well, you’re the only one of us who might be called ‘inconspicuous’ at the moment,” Barbara says, after a moment’s consideration.

“God help us all,” Sam mutters.

Dean shoots her a look, but Castiel doesn’t seem to hear in either case. She leaves the house by way of the front door, and appears outside the window a moment later. She looks around. The area seems to be unoccupied.

They wait. A few minutes later, Castiel walks back into the house.

“I saw nothing. I will keep watching,” she says.

Dean lets out a deep breath, letting the adrenaline shudder through him and spread to his limbs. He releases his grip on Sam’s wrist. Slowly, slowly, they all settle back down to the way that they had been. Dean still can’t seem to settle his nerves. He shuffles around a bit, but he can’t focus on the papers, and eventually, he pushes everything away.

“Do you have any beer?” he asks Barbara, and turning away from Sam. Sam, who speaks his brother’s words in a voice pitched higher, and wears his clothing a size too small; now she shares the same expressions that he reserves for Dean, and it freaks him out.

Barbara looks between him and Sam for a beat too long. “In the fridge,” she says, jerking her head back to indicate the kitchen behind her. “You can get it yourself, boy.”

Dean groans. “Come on, Sam. Unless you’re secretly Gumby, there’s no way I’m stretching all the way to the fridge.”

”You could lean over and use your feet,” Sam suggests, but she pushes back her chair. “Barbara, you want anything? Cas?”

“Granite City,” says Barbara, and, “Answers,” says Castiel.

 

 

**Deanna (Yard)**

_Sunday, 6:06pm_

“Sam would be pissing herself laughing if she saw me right now,” Deanna says. She tosses aside one book and picks up the next. Castiel, who had declined a chair in favor of standing at her side like a sentinel, folds the book closed with some reverence and places it onto the growing pile of rejects at his feet. Deanna shoots him a puzzled glance.

“Why?” asks Sam.

“Because …” She stumbles over her words, unaccustomed to actually having to explain things. “I, I usually don’t … I, uh … I get up to eat a lot …” she concludes, stuttering, hyperaware of his eyes and Castiel’s eyes on her.

“Oh,” says Sam. He continues to look at her. After a moment, he chuckles. It sounds forced. “Yeah. Dean, uh, he does that too.”

Deanna follows suit with his laughter. “Man, that is freaky,” she says.

“No kidding,” says Sam. “Nothing in that one?”

Deanna sighs and leans her head on her hand. “Just a lot of stories, nothing practical, and nothing that fits whatever’s going on with me and — and Dean. Bobby?”

Bobby licks his thumb and turns the next crinkled, yellow page in his book. ‘Nothing so far.’

Five hours later, there has been nothing. No sign of angels, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. They’ve waited, eaten, and waited. They looked for information. There’s the switch between Dean and Deanna. How did it happen? Is there any reason that they can find? Is there any record of this happening before? Why did it happen? And what do they need to do to set things to rights? These are all questions which need answering.

It’s dinnertime now, and Deanna is still poring over a book with print so small that her eyes keep skittering in useless patterns across the page, like her body is trying to prevent her from reading any further. Her mind, too, is skittering — to Sam, to the rest of her family, to her own world. It doesn’t matter that she’s resigned herself to never seeing any of them again. That was then, and that was her own choice, if you could call it that. That was for a cause. This is … this is nothing. It’s not real and it doesn’t matter. And now she needs to read the same damn page over again. Fuck that. She gets up to stretch. “I’m going for a walk,” she announces.

Sam’s head jerks up. “I’ll come with you,” he offers. “I could use a break, too.”

She gives him a tight smile. “You really don’t have to do that.”

[He goes outside with her anyway, because he’s afraid that she’ll try to run away. She gets that, she does. Castiel offers Sam his blade for protection, and Sam says thanks, and there’s a flicker across his face. It strikes Deanna as strange, something to file away in her head. Then she remembers that he’s Sam, and that he’s probably thinking about how if he had demon blood, he could take on pretty much anything without needing Castiel’s help, and it grates on him to have to ask for help. And she pities this man, as she cannot pity her sister, knowing her circumstances but not knowing his in precisely the same inside-out way.]

Her first shock is the cars. Deanna doesn’t know what she had been expecting: clearly, Bobby doesn’t knit, so he’s got to be doing something to support himself if he’s not selling doilies to old ladies and newlyweds. Apparently that something is running a junkyard. Deanna had been planning on walking down the road to the neighbor’s house, to see what the loony man there is like in this world, but she finds herself walking through the yard instead, looking at the cars. She ignores Sam’s footsteps behind her, soft for a man his size. She pretends that she is alone.

Crickets chirp and cicadas buzz as she winds her way through the haphazard rows of cars and runs her hands along their hoods. It’d have been nice to have a flashlight, but her night vision is good, and the moon is close to full, so she has enough light to see by. [Eh, whatever. This is stupid, and I ought to move on.]

Deanna looks back towards the house, guilt prodding at her. She should go back inside and keep on looking for something that can help her get out of Bizarro-World and back to stopping her own apocalypse. It would just be the icing on the cake, wouldn’t it, if she ends up having to clean up Lucifer in this universe because apparently every iteration of her makes the same goddamn mistakes.

She wonders what that means for her world, her Sam. She wonders if Dean is out in Barbara’s backyard, lamenting the fact that there aren’t any cars where he’d grown up. He did at least partially grow up here, she’s assuming, if her life is anything to go by. Bobby probably made him work on the cars; this rusty Buick, right here, with the fender at least a decade younger than the rest of the body, he probably made her alter ego work on that as hard as Barbara made Deanna work on needlework and hiding salt and sigils in paintings to sell at county fairs.

Deanna looks up at the stars. Still the same patterns for this time of year; that’s comforting. She lets out a sigh.

“Are you okay?”

So much for peace. She turns around. “I’m fine.”

Sam wanders closer, hands in his pockets. “Really?”

This is the part where it’s dark, and Deanna is tired, and the cars are upsetting her and she doesn’t want to show it. “Yes. Stop asking.” She turns away and glares at the Buick. If she’d grown up here, maybe she’d have learned something about cars, instead of having her mom tell her that it’s only important to know how to fix her own car in case it breaks down, that she doesn’t need to impress anyone, she just needs to keep herself safe. Maybe.

Sam’s footsteps draw closer. His shadow overlaps with her own, warped and black under the moon that hangs at its highest point. Deanna tenses, bending her knees and making sure that the gun at the small of her back is easily accessible.

He puts a hand on her shoulder, holds it there for a moment, then backs off.

“Please leave me alone,” she says. “I’m not gonna go anywhere. I just want some space to think.”

[Sam vanishes into the shadows.]

Deanna walks towards the far end of the maze of cars, as far as she can get without Sam getting suspicious. She glances back over her shoulder and waves to the shape looming in the darkness, just so that he knows she’s not going anywhere.

Then she leans back against a truck and looks up at the sky. “Dean …” she says, and realizes how ridiculous she sounds. What the hell. “This is probably the stupidest thing I’ve done, and that includes that week of my life when I prayed for some divine being to save me from Hell. So listen up. If you’re with my sister right now, don’t …” Don’t what ? Deanna scowls at the stars. “And God, if you’re listening in right now, fuck off.”

She pauses, listening to the crickets and tiny frogs in the grass. Everything is so peaceful, unearthly calm, and _wrong_. There’s a man in the shadows who wears her sister’s face and speaks with all of her weariness but none of her pent-up rage when he looks at her. A week ago, she’d have said that she’d give anything for Sam to look at her like that again, but not like this. Not this Sam. She’s grown up with a sister who thinks she’s the most important thing in the world, even though neither of them will admit it. Even though she didn’t notice it, not really, until she met the man with her sister’s way of tilting his head and quirking his eyebrows, but looks at her with a perfectly blank, polite expression occasionally marred by suspicion, as though she is a stranger who occasionally reminds him of someone else. That is all.

“Be good to Sam, okay?” she says to the sky, to the man who (she hopes) is at Barbara’s house right now. “She’s a fuck-up and a hypocrite, but she’s mine. You lay a hand on her, I’ll kill you.” The idea is oddly satisfying. If she can just focus on that, she’ll be okay. Don’t think about the end of days that she needs to avert; don’t think about the devil walking the earth; focus on the strange man who is doubtless with Sam and Castiel and Barbara at this very moment.

Castiel.

Deanna glances over her shoulder, at the silhouettes she can see through the window: Bobby’s baseball cap and Castiel standing like a statue in a cemetery. She presses her lips together. Don’t think about it, she reminds herself. Get home first. Everything else comes later.

Deanna looks up at the sky a final time. Though if she’s going to be talking to someone who is for all intents and purposes herself, she seriously doubts that ‘up’ is the correct direction to look, and corrects her gaze downward. “Same goes for Cas,” she says to Imaginary Dean. “My angel.” The words come to her lips without a second thought. She pushes herself off the hood of the truck and lands on the ground. “Good talking to you. We’ll get through this, you and me, whatever it takes.” _And then we can rest_.

Sam is still waiting, arms crossed and leaning against the garage, when she makes her way back. A little of the weight on her shoulders has lifted — or, rather, been chipped at with a blunt hammer and crammed into a box to be ignored for the moment, but who’s checking? — and she thinks that maybe she can go back to brainstorming without getting up and pacing to avoid breaking something.

Or maybe sleep. Sleep sounds good right now, about a thousand years of it.

“You good?” asks Sam.

Deanna follows him back towards the steps. “I need sleep. Maybe I’ll wake up in Minnesota again, I don’t care. That’d be fine.”


End file.
